Holy s**t, I was wondering why my fans were noisy and my computer so warm lately. So I checked inside to see this. The CPU fan is fucking resting on the graphics card like Dr House on his stick.

So I visited my aunt's house a few days back.
They heard I write code (read: Google and copy-paste from Stack Overflow), and wanted me to help repair their computers.
Saw my cousin playing Battlefield 4 at sub-20 fps with a GTX 750 Ti on the lowest settings. His fucking CPU fan was bust, and judging by the amount of dust in his system, I literally thought he was cramming dust in there on purpose.

After a heavy dusting, another stick of RAM (4GB -> 12GB), a new heatsink (CoolerMaster T400i), and a fresh copy of Windows 10 (along with Office, etc.), he could play games at 60+ fps again.

What do I get? Not even a fucking thank you. Just a "you done yet? I want to play video games."
I mean... Gee. Your cousin flew all the way to a new continent, spent his precious vacation time helping you out, and all he gets is a cold-ass shoulder.
Even my fucking ex gave me more than that.

And so I was wondering why is my cpu fan so loud...

Me: doing light browsing.
CPU Fan: increases frequency like crazy.
Me: opens task manager.
Windows 10: 60% cpu usage.
Me: sort processes by cpu usage; sum does not match.
Me: closes iTunes update window.
CPU usage: drops to less than 10%.

The update had already finished and the CPU usage was 60%!!!

WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING, APPLE?

I've always been a tech fan....

I guess cooling down CPUs is just my thing...

3 rants for the price of 1, isn't that a great deal!

1. HP, you braindead fucking morons!!!

So recently I disassembled this HP laptop of mine to unfuck it at the hardware level. Some issues with the hinge that I had to solve. So I had to disassemble not only the bottom of the laptop but also the display panel itself. Turns out that HP - being the certified enganeers they are - made the following fuckups, with probably many more that I didn't even notice yet.

- They used fucking glue to ensure that the bottom of the display frame stays connected to the panel. Cheap solution to what should've been "MAKE A FUCKING DECENT FRAME?!" but a royal pain in the ass to disassemble. Luckily I was careful and didn't damage the panel, but the chance of that happening was most certainly nonzero.
- They connected the ribbon cables for the keyboard in such a way that you have to reach all the way into the spacing between the keyboard and the motherboard to connect the bloody things. And some extra spacing on the ribbon cables to enable servicing with some room for actually connecting the bloody things easily.. as Carlos Mantos would say it - M-m-M, nonoNO!!!
- Oh and let's not forget an old flaw that I noticed ages ago in this turd. The CPU goes straight to 70°C during boot-up but turning on the fan.. again, M-m-M, nonoNO!!! Let's just get the bloody thing to overheat, freeze completely and force the user to power cycle the machine, right? That's gonna be a great way to make them satisfied, RIGHT?! NO MOTHERFUCKERS, AND I WILL DISCONNECT THE DATA LINES OF THIS FUCKING THING TO MAKE IT SPIN ALL THE TIME, AS IT SHOULD!!! Certified fucking braindead abominations of engineers!!!

Oh and not only that, this laptop is outperformed by a Raspberry Pi 3B in performance, thermals, price and product quality.. A FUCKING SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER!!! Isn't that a great joke. Someone here mentioned earlier that HP and Acer seem to have been competing for a long time to make the shittiest products possible, and boy they fucking do. If there's anything that makes both of those shitcompanies remarkable, that'd be it.

2. If I want to conduct a pentest, I don't want to have to relearn the bloody tool!

Recently I did a Burp Suite test to see how the devRant web app logs in, but due to my Burp Suite being the community edition, I couldn't save it. Fucking amazing, thanks PortSwigger! And I couldn't recreate the results anymore due to what I think is a change in the web app. But I'll get back to that later.

So I fired up bettercap (which works at lower network layers and can conduct ARP poisoning and DNS cache poisoning) with the intent to ARP poison my phone and get the results straight from the devRant Android app. I haven't used this tool since around 2017 due to the fact that I kinda lost interest in offensive security. When I fired it up again a few days ago in my PTbox (which is a VM somewhere else on the network) and today again in my newly recovered HP laptop, I noticed that both hosts now have an updated version of bettercap, in which the options completely changed. It's now got different command-line switches and some interactive mode. Needless to say, I have no idea how to use this bloody thing anymore and don't feel like learning it all over again for a single test. Maybe this is why users often dislike changes to the UI, and why some sysadmins refrain from updating their servers? When you have users of any kind, you should at all times honor their installations, give them time to change their individual configurations - tell them that they should! - in other words give them a grace time, and allow for backwards compatibility for as long as feasible.

3. devRant web app!!

As mentioned earlier I tried to scrape the web app's login flow with Burp Suite but every time that I try to log in with its proxy enabled, it doesn't open the login form but instead just makes a GET request to /feed/top/month?login=1 without ever allowing me to actually log in. This happens in both Chromium and Firefox, in Windows and Arch Linux. Clearly this is a change to the web app, and a very undesirable one. Especially considering that the login flow for the API isn't documented anywhere as far as I know.

So, can this update to the web app be rolled back, merged back to an older version of that login flow or can I at least know how I'm supposed to log in to this API in order to be able to start developing my own client?

If a CPU were an employee...

CPU: Hey boss, I'm seeing you are giving me a lot of mathematical tasks that would really profit from splitting into parallel calculations. GPU's are great for that, we should get one.

Boss: But you can still do them, right? If you can do it, I'm pretty sure you can do it at GPU speeds. We gotta save up so I can buy another car!

----------------------

Boss: Why is this taking so long?

CPU: I'm overloaded with work, so I'm overheating. Maybe you could buy a GPU to help me out, or at least a fan...

Boss: You're overheating? Your personal problems should not affect your professional life. Learn to get your shit together or we will hire someone who will

CPU: *melts*

Had the Windows Insider Preview for a month or so to get Ubuntu Subsystem early back when it was Insider-only.

Turns out that your license policy changes when you use Preview builds: if your PC isn't updated to a certain build by checkpoints set throughout the year, your license expires and you have to reinstall Windows. No way to recover anything already on the device. So if you get Insider Preview and shut your laptop off for too long...

Thus began a killer combo attack on my Surface Pro 3.

While trying to figure out what was going on and loading up a recovery on a flash drive, the Surface Pro 3 BIOS was sitting idle behind me. On 100% CPU. The only reason I think this is that by the time I noticed the insane fan noise, the screen was hot enough to burn my finger as I tried to turn it off. The heat sensor triggered it to shut off before I could, though.

That heat sensor, however, won't turn it off if it's busy installing Windows, supposedly to keep anything from getting hopelessly corrupted. What followed we're 3 hours of fan whirring from a slab of metal hot enough to cook an egg with.

Windows is back and working. The battery indicator, however, melted during reinstallation. And the battery lasts an hour, max. Thankfully I'm not out of a tablet, but it seems to me that W10 is becoming more and more like malware, just waiting for you to activate one of it's delightful payloads.

Oh dear, a scaling problem I solved was replacing some Regex matching with simpler string functions. While I'm a huge fan of Regex, it's unreal how much performance they can suck out of some high-n loops...
I got about 120x out of some critical code thus making a CPU upgrade unnecessary.

After long time logged into windows desktop and dared to open internet explorer then I seen option

"What's New in Internet Explorer 8"

So I thought let's see what's new in IE8

When I clicked on that option, suddenly my CPU fan stopped working.

There was no connection between them,
But what a coincidence!

F***U IE:D

- booting Linux
- starting Clonezilla
- kernel panic after some time
- WTF, this used to work
- look at sensor values
- CPU is really hot
- CPU fan doesn't work
- BIOS warning disabled because the lowest regular fan level is 0 RPM

Luckily, I still had some cheap 120mm fan which is a bit louder, but works. What's astonishing is that in normal operation, i.e. without full load, the case fans alone provided enough air stream for the CPU cooler.

>Gets a new CPU for desktop (yay, went from R5 1600 to R5 3600X)
>Spends half a day flashing new MB BIOS (Needed to flash individual major versions in order, couldn't just go 1.10 to 6.40)
>Finally finishes preparations and goes to replace the CPU
>Cleans the old one and packages it to give it to a friend
>Has issues inserting the new one as the orientation arrow on the motherboard was very hard to make out
>Spends 30 minutes applying thermal paste, worrying about optimal spread
>Forgets which side the CPU fan goes on
>Finally boots back up... CPU fan is suddenly loud AF under load, but eh, temps under stress are sub-60, so, good

~~Next day~~
>Loud CPU fan is too annoying, opens the case again
>CPU fan is on backwards
Ugh
>Takes the fan off, turns it around and fastens again, puts PC back together and boots
>Is quiet again, nice
>Goes to work on the PC
>2 hours later randomly checks temps because no fan noise is weird
>CPU at 75dC, crap
>Opens the (live) PC, CPU fan is not spinning
>Has put the header on one pin to a side
>Unplugs and replugs it correctly
>Fan suddenly starts spinning very fast and cuts my finger
>Finally closes the case once more. All issues resolved

...Its situations like these that make me wonder... What would happen it I had to work with servers in person, physically lol

Any idea how to make a fan in an HP laptop spin at lower temperatures? The fan in my Pavilion dm-1 only starts spinning when CPU reaches 75°C and enters full speed when the GPU also becomes 75°C. Which is strange because this CPU and GPU are one and the same thing.. an APU. And overheating freezes often happen at around 75-80°C.. which isn't too much of a headroom really. I'd rather have it kick in at 50-60°C already, but would like to avoid using the power of the soldering iron for it.. I've already lost a fan to that previously (current one is a spare part from AliExpress). Granted, my soldering experience was much less back then.. nowadays I can probably even solder 1206 SMD packages comfortably. But I don't want to risk it, and I've got experience with custom kernels anyway.. are there any fan speed governors in the kernel that you know of?

FWIW, fancontrol doesn't seem to be supported on this laptop, and neither is pwmconfig. Perhaps I'll have to stick to the electronics method after all? Given that it's just a 5V fan, I guess that I could feed it power by tapping some power from a USB rail and controlling its speed from an ATtiny85.. but inside the laptop there isn't enough space for that and I don't feel like freeing this hardware out of its laptop chassis yet (though that is on the list). Either way running at 60°C under no load is terrible.. some HP certified enganeering "feature" I guess...

My GPU blocks the airflow from the lower front intake fan to the CPU, so I wanted to have a fan in the 5.25" drive bay directly targeting the CPU.

While that bay fits a 140mm fan nicely, there was no mounting point. I ended up making four fan struts out of the metal covers for the 5.25" inserts, the ones that you wiggle out. Drilled holes into the case, a bit of foam above and below the fan to seal the larger gaps, and done.

The trick is ofc that the 5.25" case covers are meshed and hence act both as air intake and dust filter. The CPU runs a few K cooler under load.

WHY THE FUCK DOES THIS ALWAYS HAPPEN TO ME!
My system wont FUCKING POST! IT HAS POWER! IT HAS A CPU! IT HAS A GRAPHICS CARD! AND ALMOST ANY FAN IS FUCKING SPINNING! BUT NO FUCKING POST LED! FUCK THIS!

Guess what my old Windows 8.1 laptop and a Nintendo 64 have in common?

Neither have a goddamn fan or a CMOS battery!!! I shit you not, I opened up my old windows 8.1 computer from like 2012 and it did not have a fan. Instead it had a large piece of metal connected to a CPU as a heatsink. It also never had a CMOS battery since the solder pads have never been used.

This will be my last project ever with WordPress. Seems like they added a site "customizer" (wysiwyg) which looks fancy and all, but after a few minutes configuring options the customizer starts lagging, fan starts getting louder, CPU & RAM go up so I do some profiling on that page:

Full layout repaints on every mousemove event, mem usage starts at 125MB and goes up up up to even 200MB while staying idle.. wtf? How did this even get shipped?

What was supposed to be a simple HDD to SSD upgrade for my brother ended up taking 3 fucking days.

His computer's idle temp was fucking 90c because of fucking YEARS worth of dust preventing fans from breathing, one of them was even dead so I had to go to best buy to get a new one.

Had a power outage happen in the middle of cleaning the damn dust out before replacing the bad fan. It took close to 24 hours for it to come back, and I just didn't bother until the day after cause fuck that.

When I go back to it, I finish cleaning the dust, clone the old HDD to the new SSD, do the swap out, replace the thermal paste on CPU cause why the fuck not at this point. Then turn it on to test, yeah from 90c down to 20c : |

Yeah... so I charged him for the new fan, and the hour-ish it took me to clean the damn dust and replace the fan... (drive was agreed to be done for free as a favor) Yeah not really worth charging for but I was pissed and that was the 'nicest' way I could show how annoyed I was with him not properly caring for the PC. Like honestly 90 degrees celsius. I refuse to believe he didn't notice impacted performance in his games

A few days ago I decided to install Windows 7 on a VM (bad idea as it turned out). All fine and dandy and I ran Windows Update a few times to get it at least as up-to-date as it'll get.

I noticed that out of the 4GB RAM I had allocated, an svchost process responsible for the updates was gobbling up all the available memory, just leaving 82MB for everything else. The process itself was as you might imagine consuming over 3GB RAM just for itself. That's how an OS should work right after installation, I'm sure you'll agree.

So I complained about it. Haven't used Windows anywhere for a while so I wasn't used anymore to this level of efficiency. Disk activity went through the roof, though to be fair the underlying disk wasn't an SSD (qcow2 on ZFS on a spinning drive). RAM consumption is something I already covered. CPU temperature shot up to 95C.

So as any idiot would do, I disabled the service related to that process (the svchost process for wuauserv) and the problem went away. But I complained of course, saying that such amazing system utilization metrics wasn't something I expected. I mean for 4GB allocated, having as much as 82MB usable to get stuff done with! 95C on the CPU, on a lot of chips that's the junction temperature! Absolutely beautiful.

When I complained I heard that I had to replace the thermal grease. I do that twice a year. I wrote a custom fan driver for my system that works absolutely great. It was obviously shit. I must be a horrible sysadmin for solving a problem by eliminating the cause, and companies hiring me must be ashamed of themselves. My hardware must be shit (that's a common one with Windows users) despite being a business laptop and the guest system being a VM. Oh and I'm an idiot of course for complaining about such amazing system metrics in Windows.

I love Windows and its community...

Me: ugh I really hate the lack of graphics performance in virtual box and not a fan of how CPU hungry VMware can get... Fuck it let's try gnome boxes

Also me: *spends 4 hours diagnosing issues with gnome boxes and Ubuntu 18.04 based distros*

But so far... Worth it. Seems pretty damn good so far

Yesterday I finished off a clientbuild then I checked if it's posting and he picked it up.

Today he called my boss and said that it's saying no CPU fan.

I connected the aio on the aio fan header not on the one for the cpu.

Thanks Asus for that selfdescriptive
Labeling now I can sieve to the client and fix this on a Saturday.

Acer vs MSI Laptops.

Five years ago I bought an acer aspire vn7-591 laptop in Redcoon. It was the expensive laptop I bought ever in those days. My experience at the beginning was really bad because the battery laptop crashed after few months and the screen had some vague/dead pixels, but the worst was the imminent bankruptcy of Redcoon. So I couldn't use the warranty. Anyway, It didn't bother so much I have been enjoying this laptop and still doing it. However, last year the screen put me on alert since it started to fail with vertical bars and color changes.
It was time to buy a new computer and due to the problems with some of the components, I've decided to buy a laptop from a company with a better reputation than Acer in aspects as the reliability of the components.
My choice was a Msi Prestige 15 because of the thunderbolts, since the rest of specs are 'more or less similar', although it has more updated hardware, it is lighter, battery holds up to 4-5 hours etc... But... It is really noisy compared to my Acer computer. 2 CPU fans are around 3000 rpm in idle state... Acer seems to be working without using the fans if you are doing intensive work. I google it as I thought it was a factory problem, but it seems to be not a malfunctioning... In fact I found other users complaining about the same and the community proposed to reduce the fan speed through software.
Right now I have both laptops working and since the new boy is in house, Acer is working flawlessly. I am preparing the Acer for my girlfriend as a gift, otherwise it is a pitty to shut it down and store it in a wardrobe.
So, this is my impression about ACER and MSI. I m still experiencing with the new laptop, but I find weird things like the fan speed or how hot it gets in idle despite it uses a new generation of intel i7 cpu with lower consumption... I should monitor the power consumption...

After waiting for almost a month, yesterday I went to check on how my computer was doing, since I hadn't got any messages or calls ever since.
I go to the store and ask one of the workers about how my laptop is doing, and that I'd left it there almost a month ago and that they'd tell me when it was time to get the papers and then the laptop itself. The girl asks me for my phone number and then my name, and found nothing on the computer. She goes somewhere inside the store and comes back with a colleague, who tells me that I need a process paper. I pull out the receipt the technician photocopied and signed because that was the only thing I had. I hadn't touched that part of my paste for the whole time after I left the computer there and I was 100% sure I didn't have the process paper with me until he started pressing me for it. I kept repeating that the technician told me that they'd call or message me when said process paper was ready, which I hadn't got any of those to go pick it up. The guy asks me if that were the number and name I'd given the tech guy and I said yes. Both of them disappear into the store again. They come back with a cardboard box and say that the surname written there was wrong by a char (as I've said before my name is unusual, and my surname is also unusual where I'm studying, but where I'm from there's like 5 or 6 families with that surname), so that's why they couldn't find it in the computer. After that they went through all the details I gave on the time of handing the PC and the number they told me was there was off by miles. I think I may have said a wrong digit but that number was way off. There should be some person who got calls or messages about a computer they don't even own LoL
They told me to try it and see if it was running OK and that I had 15d to go back if something was wrong
When I got home I turned it on, afraid it would start dying on me again LoL
I pass the login screen and the fan just starts working really hard and I'm worried. The ASUS guys reinstalled Win8 and the CPU is running wild already, going at about 3,5 GHz (2,5 max) and over 30% usage on nothing
After some minor inconveniences (making the USB with Win10 took longer than expected) I finally installed Win10 and the CPU usage drops to < 10% and runs at way below the 2,5 GHz max. It constantly uses <= 10-15% CPU and the fan makes no noise unless I put in a heavier game (like Oxygen Not Included - it asks for 4GB RAM minimum 8I), in which case it goes up a bit and runs at around 3 GHz, but it doesn't make as much noise as before, thank jesus. I'm gonna keep trying to see how it does and hope I don't have to go back to the store after the next 15d 8I
I can finally work and not be a leech on my friends because my old toshiba - which I forgot I'd brought with me to uni - is really old and it makes a lot of noise (the fan is constantly working too much but it's so old I don't bother anymore) and it heats my room a lot, so it's gonna be a nice change of pace HaHa

I'm calling you out, Asus, fix your absolutely shitty piece of software or I'm never buying a motherboard from you again.

A little explanation: my PC woke up from sleep like this. On another occasion before I could take the screenshot, the CPU was sitting almost idle at 45 degrees C. The CPU fan senses that it has to spin up, but never actually does so.

I've had the opposite thing before - a case fan spinning up not wanting to spin down even if the temps are fine - which is preferable because it only causes a little bit of noise. But this here could potentially cause damage to the CPU if I put some load on it without looking at the temperature. I've partly remedied the issue by writing a batch script that kills and resets the fan control service and is triggered by Task Scheduler on resume from sleep - a thing every average Joe should do, right?

It's a shame for top-notch hardware to have to go together with such crappy piece of software. This is the X99 Sabertooth that cost me 450 EUR originally.

So Im planning to build a pc, which i will mainly use it for dev and gaming in free time, my main components will be:
CPU: INTEL 8700K
GPU: GTX 1080 msi or gigabyte?
SSD: 860 EVO
RAM: 16GB 3200MHZ
MOTHERBOARD: should i go with msi or gigabyte whixh one is better?
PSU: 650W or 700W deepcooler?

Also for the cpu cooler do i get water colling or a standard cpu fan?

P.S: i plan to overclock the cpu and gpu at some point.
Also whats your opinion on the rgb lightning gpu and motherboard, and is there point in getting a mobo with sli support (is it work buying second gpu at some point or better upgrade the existing)

So my processor fan will no longer fit in my mobo, caused by 3 out of 4 stands broken. I don't want to fry my CPU, so won't be using it until the replacement arrives.

Time to experience a different life for time being?

> picking parts for best possible piecemeal upgrade/sidegrade price with parts made after 2011
> need CPU, mobo, RAM, case
> Ryzen 5 2600, 16? No, 32GB DDR4 of just whatever speed...
> wait, what do you mean new motherboards are $300? Wait.
> Wait, no, how is the one Ryzen motherboard under $100 a shit B450M on sale? The fuck are these prices?

TIL motherboards are volatile as fuck on price. In fact, mobos are less stable in value than most crypto.

Jesus fuck.

(The one B450M i saw is actually now $140-some and a nice X570 is currently $120. Why does the price of these fuckers change *daily?*)

as for case none under $100 are good so i picked some random mostly-mesh ATX mid case over my preferred ATX full case and i'm just gonna pray i can find some fan config that works because at this point i'm done with this shit fuck this, a bottom-barrel mobo, low-tier cpu and a decent case shouldn't be $400 or more

Please tell me there's an alternative to speedfan than lets me set up a custom curve for fan speeds. At the minute it's either constant server level noise. Or adjusting speeds manually every time i want to do something that requires high CPU load and putting them back to acceptable idle noise levels afterwards