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Old 11-25-2012, 02:02 PM   #1
Brannigans Law
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Question PC General troubleshooting & Questions thread

I figured since there's a lot of day to day quirks computers throw at us a general thread for this type of thing could be useful.

I recently upgraded my computer to a SSD drive and kept the SATA I have as a media drive. Everything works perfect and I'm thrilled with the SSD but I now notice that when I turn my computer on there's a flashing underscore " _ "for about 20~ seconds. Once it stops it loads into the boot devices. I figure there's something happening in my BIOS that's hanging and doing a check before it loads the boot sequence. The only thing I can think of is I totally unhooked my HDD thin and wide ribbon cable from my MOBO as it wasn't actually connected to anything.

Any ideas?
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Old 11-25-2012, 02:11 PM   #2
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The controller that unused port is attached to is probably set to auto-identify attached devices. Disable the controller completely (if no other devices are connected to it), or set the drive type to none for the empty port, and the delay should go away.
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Old 11-25-2012, 10:03 PM   #3
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Also as a sidenote make sure that your Bios reflects the proper boot order, SSD/Optical Drive/USB Ect.

Also see if there are any newer Bios Flashes (firmware) for your Bios that may better detect a SSD.
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Old 11-25-2012, 10:14 PM   #4
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I'm sorry to be all take and no support in my first post in this thread...but:
- My laptop seems to be having extremely asymmetrical cooling. One fan is running much, much hotter than the other and the ones on the bottom of it doesn't eject much heat at all. Is there much of a workaround?
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Old 11-26-2012, 12:08 AM   #5
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Is there an equal amount of airflow coming from each fan? If so, then there is likely not much wrong with the situation, since there are likely internal parts (like a video card) that is generating more heat in one location.

Even then, can't hurt to closely inspect for dust buildup, especially inside. Use a good flashlight and if you see a buildup, give it a good shot with canned air or the equiv. I once had a laptop, that required bi-monthly cleaning of one of the fans on the bottom, to deal with the massive dust that would collect on the components inside.
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Old 11-26-2012, 08:23 AM   #6
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Rathji View Post
Is there an equal amount of airflow coming from each fan? If so, then there is likely not much wrong with the situation, since there are likely internal parts (like a video card) that is generating more heat in one location.
The concern is kind of two fold in that regard:
- There are four fans: two on the back, on either side of the plug-in (centre-back), and two on the bottom. I have no ability to gauge the airflow patterns out the bottom, but one of the two on back has a higher airflow and runs hotter. I've blown the air out of all four fans before, and it helps marginally.
- The more concerning of the two is the heating distribution before and after an event. In a moment of not looking where I was going, I managed to trip over a cord while carrying the laptop and drop it on a wooden floor (I would hazard a guess that the impact would have been from about 3 feet up). Before the incident, the heating was much more distributed, in particular on the bottom of of the laptop - all four fans felt as if they had gotten use and no particular area had been cool. At this time, I think the mean of the core temperatures was hovering around 55-60 degrees Celsius. As I tested it this morning under similar conditions (same game, same amount of outside support for air circulations, it ran around 70 C. In addition, compared to before, the heat pattern on the bottom is much less uniform, with the vents leading to the back fans being much (10 C I'm guessing) hotter than the vents leading to the bottom, a stark contrast to the pretty uniform distribution I had before.
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Old 11-26-2012, 09:16 AM   #7
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^ discreet graphics chip, or is graphics provided through the chipset?

With the drop, it almost sounds like a heatpipe got jarred from it's seal on either the CPU or a graphics chip. Reminds me of a laptop I had where the heat transfer pad between heatpipe and GPU broke down, leaving a very small gap between contact.
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Old 11-26-2012, 03:00 PM   #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BloodFetish View Post
^ discreet graphics chip, or is graphics provided through the chipset?

With the drop, it almost sounds like a heatpipe got jarred from it's seal on either the CPU or a graphics chip. Reminds me of a laptop I had where the heat transfer pad between heatpipe and GPU broke down, leaving a very small gap between contact.
Not sure. I remember deconstructing it to try to find the issue and couldn't find any. Then again, I didn't look very hard.

If it helps, the Laptop is a Sager 8130 (a base model in the link below).
http://www.agearnotebooks.com/sagernp8130.html

I agree with your hypothesis though. It seems likely that the heat pipe to the bottom fans were jarred, so they don't do any work, forcing the back ones to compensate.
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