totheknife.com

EDIT: I will be out of action until I get my Windows 7 install behaving properly again. Running tests from the XP install on the same computer. See my most recent response to the thread.


The processor has arrived. Didn't come with a cooler, but didn't expect it to being used and all. Came with some cheap Chinese branded thermal compound that I will not be using. What I will be using is Arctic Silver 3 I had from a previous install.

Going from an Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 2.53ghz dual core processor. (Overclocked to 3.1ghz)
To an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4ghz quad core processor.

Slightly slower clock speed, double the cores, virtualization support, larger cache.

The big drawback until I can confirm my existing cooler will keep it cool when overclocking, is that I'll be dropping from 3.1ghz to 2.4ghz temporarily. If my existing cooler can't cut it, I'll buy an aftermarket one that can.

Off to clean before doing the swap. See you guys late tonight at the latest.

Hope everything goes well!

Success on the stock Core 2 Duo cooler with an old tube of Arctic Silver 3. Wasn't even a copper core heatsink. All the discussions I had read while doing research to see if I'd need to buy a new cooling solution seemed to state that only the Core 2 Quad cooler would do, and a big maybe on the stock Core 2 Duo heatsinks that had a copper core.

Runs up to around 61° C while playing MWO. MWO now runs the same at 2.4ghz on four cores as it did at 3.1ghz on two cores. I still aim to overclock, but only a little bit until I get a new heatsink.

Had to stop playing MWO because someone in the house started hogging the internet connection. Mid-match chasing Greyrook around I went from a 30 ping to a 350 ping. Massive difference in aim leading.

My average ping is around 170, and skyrockets into the thousands when anybody on my network does anything, so I feel for ya bro.

Apparently Windows 7 has decided to take a crap. I still have XP as a dual boot on this computer and it boots just fine. Windows 7 started randomly freezing up and now seemingly wont boot properly. Safe mode works. System File Checker claims everything is fine. Check Disk claims both hard drives are fine.

While in XP I'm going to run stress tests on all of the hardware to see if I can pinpoint a piece of hardware going bad. If not, then it's 7's fault and I'll need to repair it.

Well, the problem is found. The primary hard disk has developed a couple bad sectors in the partition on which Windows 7 is installed. Fortunately, the XP partition is clean, Win 7 was doing daily backups to the 1.5 terabyte disk and I used a Linux based imager to image the drive last night.

Unfortunately, the image of the Win 7 partition fails each time. I'll have to hand pick files around the bad sectors.

I have such terrible luck with hardware so far this year.

Apparently. Sorry to hear it, man.

Windows XP's Check Disk to the rescue. It has yet again succeeded at fixing bad sectors where Windows 7's failed to even find them.

It appears this drive has had bad sectors near the 'end of the drive' for a long time. The partition Windows 7 is installed on was previously only ever used for an Ubuntu install I hardly used. Meaning it hardly ever wrote to nor read from most of the partition. These bad sectors could've been there since it was manufactured.

Check Disk found only one file with bad sectors, an Avast! AntiVirus update file. After fixing that and writing the location of the bad sectors to the "bad sector file", Windows 7 boots again. That said, I can't trust this hard drive anymore. After doing a backup, I'll continue using this install until I get a replacement hard drive. If it fails, I have the backup. If not, it'll get securely wiped and recycled after imaging the contents to the new drive.

FYI I will be on for practice. System is stable enough to play.

Excellent!