Computer Disaster Corner

[spendorman]

I've thought of water cooling, but not been brave enough! I just use an old but upgraded business machine, they are usually pretty quiet.

[struth]

What is it anyway?

[CageyH]

It's like a car cooling circuit.
The engine is the processor, so you add a pump, reservoir, hoses and a water block.
It runs about 10 degrees cooler than air cooling the processor, and as I said, it is almost silent.

The downsides - the cost, the fact that you could "spring a leak" and the amount of space it takes up in the computer case.

[walpurgis]

Got the PC running nicely. Boots much quicker now. I've only installed the minimum of third party software.

Took me a while today. Had to install W7 twice, I.E. wouldn't run properly. Then I couldn't find the version of Maxthon Browser I'd been using previously, so I tried several versions before settling on the latest version of Maxthon Cloud Browser. Very nice to use.

I go for Maxthon 'cos it's the only browser I can find that opens a new tab immediately when I click on an item in the favourites bar. That's feature I like a lot.

[spendorman]

All's well now, excellent.

Since fitting a hybrid drive to replace a conventional one, boot time has not only decreased massively, but is more consistent over time, also PC responds much faster, and again consistently.

I also use Maxthon, but also Chrome, Firefox, Pale Moon and Vivaldi.

[prsjnb]

I've thought of water cooling, but not been brave enough! I just use an old but upgraded business machine, they are usually pretty quiet.

With current multicore processors (which are now seriously over-specified for most mainstream computing tasks) , half-decent (i.e., non-stock) CPU fan with PWM control and case fans from the likes of Noctua it is not difficult to purchase/build/modify a PC that is essentially 'silent-running'.

Not infrequently problems with noise can be resolved by removing accumulated dust and detritus from inside the case and fans (including those in/on the graphics card and PSU), improving the air-flow in (careful cable managment) and around the case and by not situating the PC close to a source of heat. Water-cooling is only really worth considering once these issues have been attended to and then only if one is contemplating some seriously hard-core over-clocking.

My current PC build (based around an Intel Skylake Core i7 6700 CPU with 16 GB RAM, M2 PCIe Gen. 3x4 NVMe SSD, SATA-III SSD, SATA-III HDD and AMD Radeon Firepro W5000 graphics card; which, I confess, is massively over-powered for my needs) resides in the same room as my audio kit and is essentially inaudible in use, even when listening to music with quiet passages at modest listening levels.

[walpurgis]

I keep I.E. on the PC, but Maxthon is the default. I also keep SRWare Iron Portable browser on a memory stick just in case. It comes in handy if I want to give XP a spin, as the packaged version of I.E. in XP is non-functional, so another means of accessing the net is required.

[CageyH]

Water-cooling is only really worth considering once these issues have been attended to and then only if one is contemplating some seriously hard-core over-clocking.

My current PC build (based around an Intel Skylake Core i7 6700 CPU with 16 GB RAM, M2 PCIe Gen. 3x4 NVMe SSD, SATA-III SSD, SATA-III HDD and AMD Radeon Firepro W5000 graphics card; which, I confess, is massively over-powered for my needs) resides in the same room as my audio kit and is essentially inaudible in use, even when listening to music with quiet passages at modest listening levels.

I forgot to mention that my i7-6700k is seriously overclocked, as is my graphics card.
It is overkill for 90% of what I use my PC for but the 10% where I need the power it works quite well.

[spendorman]

I've been using Outlook 2007 since about 2009, no real problems, yesterday, I sent emails to a couple of friends without attachments. They asked my what the attachment was. I had not intentionally attached anything, but they got winmail.dat attachments. They are not using Outlook, when they returned the email I see no attachment.

Looking this up the winmail.dat attachment contains formatting info specifically for Outlook, so it is redundant if the recipient is using another client or webmail.

I've tried some of the fixes that are posted, nothing working. There is a fix that involves altering the registry, but I don't fancy that.

Any ideas?

Later tonight I might try a backup of the whole system done a few days ago.

[walpurgis]

Not heard of that issue.