Vincent's Rants

Hello once again, faithful readers!
I was appalled today to hear a friend (obviously not very computer literate, and whom shall remain nameless) say that A/C in an office with computers is optional, not required. Perhaps in Alaska! <G>
Many new computers have an LM78 or similar IC (sometimes two) to monitor various parameters inside the PC, such as voltages, fan speeds, CPU temperature, and motherboard temperature. There are good reasons the last three are monitored! In the event that a fan were to fail, or one of the temperatures exceed specifications (which are as low as 60 C for CPU and 50 C for the MB) the CPU speed is instantly cut back to 1/8 to 1/2 normal CPU clock speed. Why? To save the CPU from self-destruction due to the overheat, which may be caused by inadequate/failed heatsink/fan on the CPU, poor case ventilation, excessive room temperature, or resulting from overclocking modifications. So, obviously if the system runs at temperatures over these, performance will take a big hit. Reliability also suffers a lot with room temperatures in excess of 85 degrees F. I've seen several computers fail from the heat of a 90 degree F room.
Today's CPU's dissipate as much as 35 watts, in approximately one square inch (more area on PPros and PII's) which mandates a good heatsink. As I mentioned previously, it is not impossible to keep a CPU running at under 80 F with one, good case ventilation, and air temp in the high 60's. But, the CPU is not the only item to get hot. Your RAM, cache, chipset, video card, sound card, hard drive, and monitor are also devices which require cooling, and are proven to be less reliable in an un-airconditioned environment. A/C also removes humidity from the air and filters dust from it. So, why be without it? Huge corporations can't have been wrong for decades, keeping their computers in very cool rooms. There is a reason folks! The inside of the computer case is also often 10 F warmer than ambient air due to all of the heat sources inside.
If a CPU is cool enough, it can be run much harder. So, if I run mine in an ambient temperature of 68 F (I don't keep my A/C below 77, but my downstairs can get this cool easily) and somebody else runs theirs in an ambient of 90 F, I will be able to get more speed AND stability out of mine, if all other factors are he same. I use an extra large heatsink on the CPU, and also install an auxiliary fan in the case, for better cooling and in case the power supply fan fails. My Aunt's computer burned up when her fan failed in a 90 F room while the system was operating. The HD was too noisy to hear the fan stop, but the HD and CPU rapidly let her know that all data was lost. :-) DEC used the following theory on a personal supercomputer of 767 MHz. By keeping the CPU cooled to a sub-freezing level with a refrigeration system contained in the case, they were able to significantly increase the clock speed.

So, it is a matter of personal choice, but my computers will always be treated to cool air, and I will enjoy the increased speed and service life, plus the greater stability. If you want to take chances with several thousand dollars of equipment, perhaps you enjoy the thrill of risks like that. I don't though. :-)

Browsers & Web Caching Software
Hello once again, faithful readers!
It has come to my attention that the function and usefulness of Web caching software is not well known. The cache (both memory and disk) in a Web browser, such as Netscape Navigator, is not long lived, is not as fast as other products, and does not have advanced functions such as pre-fetching and prediction. It also is limited to 64MB,** but this limit will almost never be reached as the cache data is not held on disk very long (ever see the "Cache Cleanup, removing 1200 files" dialog?). Some of you access the Web at work (or at home for us technogeeks<G>) via a caching proxy server. This cache is usually much larger, and longer lived, than Netscape's. It also has the advantages of scale, in that if twenty folks are using it, the amount of sites already in the cache will potentially be much larger than the sites stored in one person's Netscape cache. The Wizard's Tower uses a caching proxy server at 192.168.53.215, port 8000, which is fed by all of my Internet dialup users and any local users (friends and myself). This proxy server is also pre-loaded by another caching proxy server, but this one is different. I run Gotit! on another machine, which is an intelligent, pre-fetching, predicting cache. Every night, Gotit refreshes it's cache, which in effect pulls the data into our main Proxy server, keeping some of it's data refreshed at least daily. Gotit is a great program, which will speed up almost anyone's Internet access considerably.

What can you do, besides obtaining Gotit, to speed your WWW experience?
Under the Edit menu of Netscape, there is a Preferences tab. Click on this, then go into the Advanced folder in there. Click on Cache.* Set the Memory Cache to 1024 on a 16-meg RAM machine, 2048 for a 32 meg RAM machine, and 4096 for a 64+ meg RAM machine. Set the Disk cache to 9216 Kb on machines with little hard drive space, (20 MB free etc.) and if you have in excess of 100 megabytes free, set it to 65535 Kb.** (it will almost never actually use that much). Again, the cache in Netscape is not very good (although apparently better than Internet Explorer's) and with Gotit in use, I recommend Netscape's memory cache setting to be 512 Kb, and the disk cache to 4096 Kb, as Gotit will be doing the bulk of the caching. Try to give Gotit at least 64 MB of a cache on your HD. If you have 200 MB free, set it to 128 MB or more. It won't fill up overnight, but Gotit will eventually fill it up. Gotit also takes a couple of weeks to learn your surfing habits for best speed, so if you install it, give it some time before you decide to buy it or not. You can't just install it, not surf for two weeks, and expect it to know what to prefetch for you. <G> There is almost no disadvantage to using Gotit, if it isn't refreshing the pages you want often enough, simply press your browser's Refresh button, and you'll always have the latest copy. The time saved by Gotit is considerable, and I'm sure you will find it a good value, as I have. The downside is that it is only compatible with Windows '95 or NT, and will almost certainly not work with my WCNavigator winsock dialup software. I'd need to get a program called WCPPP before I can offer 100% true dialup connections to everyone. I'll post more on these topics as users request.
Enjoy!!
-Vince

Wizard's Tower Update
Hello once again, faithful readers!
I am beginning to cut down the number of messages stored on the system from about 300,000 to something more reasonable, which will speed up searches and off-line mail runs. Most folks don't need echomail from years ago. If anyone has any special needs for an echo to keep more than 200-500 messages in it at all times, let me know and I'll gladly give it a 1000 or 2000 message limit.
There is a Computer Show coming up on the 25th, this Saturday. I need to go to purchase items for friends, and am looking for folks to come along. As always, I take care of all transportation to and from the show to my place in TR. Let me know if you are interested ASAP. The show is in Cherry Hill and is the area's second largest.
We had a hardware crash last night (NT bluescreen) that was not auto-restartable. These are extremely rare as NT has proven itself to be a robust O/S. However, since we installed the last 64 MB DIMM I assume that the SDRAM timings had to be slowed slightly, so I incremented one of them, we will have to see if it happens again. These kinds of crashes can be brought on by memory inadequacies and are usually fixable by entering more wait states in the BIOS. Of course, our running at a 75 MHz bus speed doesn't help. <G> But even so, the crashes have been less than once a month, and this is only the second one. I apologize for the downtime.
I am working on cleaning up this page and editing the older rants to reflect later information. Please bear with my lack of timely updates due to a lack of time.

Today's News
I'm glad to announce that we now have a 56K x2 connection to the Internet!
The average connect speed is a mere 48000 BPS but this is almost double our prior rate, so expect a faster surfing experience to or from this site.
If anyone ever wants to be quoted in this column, or turn this disorganized mess <G> into something nicer, let me know. I'm open for suggestions and want to get this page graphical soon (or at least away from hospital-like Hi-Gloss Ultra Pure White <G>).

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