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[kinzel]

And so, the subject of this entry was to be fluffy and light -- yes -- snow. Snowing for the second day in the row, this time to some effect.

But no, having rescued Rolanni from a snowy hill I come home to the oddity of only having the Linux box on... the Windows machine, a Vaio VGC-RB40, has shut itself off in my absence.

When I rebooted it, I got the cryptic message "chassis fan is turning too slow, F1 to..." and etc.

In fact, when I opened the case I discovered the fan did not spin easily and I did my best to clean out accumulations and then I rebooted...

and got the same warning message as the fan slowed down to nothing...

So having cleaned that fan again (and the box entire big time when I opened the side of the case), I got the message, bu the fan continued to run and in fact gained speed rather than losing it...

So, is having the side of the case open and off any replacement for the fan drawing at proper speed? The processor fan is working. As far as I can hear, the power supply fan works....

...this mess is coming at a bad time since we just moved all of the SRM bookkeeping over here from Rolanni's machine...

Meanwhile... does anyone have experience with Linux accounting programs for small business? Has GnuCash really grown up? If I'm messing with stuff it may be time to make *that* move, too.

Comments

[kimuro.livejournal.com]

FWIW,

My son in college studying computer art and chatting for hours at a time with his friend in Scotland habitually runs his CPU with the side off for exactly that reason - it runs cooler, he says.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

The chassis fan isn't particularly important, especially if you leave the side off (if you want you can stick a table-top fan blowing into the case, that's what I do with one of mine). If you go into the BIOS settings (usually pressing DEL while it's first booting, before it goes into Windows -- some BIOS use ALT-F2 or something else, but it should say during the boot sequence) there should in one of the menus be a way to tell it that you don't have a fan (or not one which senses speed) so ignore it. It's often under "Health Checks" or an 'advanced' menu, along with things like voltage options. Unfortunately even knowing the BIOS manufacturer doesn't help to predict where such things are, they all change them a lot in each version (especially laptops).

Although I'm a Linux person, I'm not an accounting one (I rarely even use a spreadsheet for anything) so I can't help with GnuCash except that I'm told it's now a lot better than it was a year or so back. It will directly import from MS Money and Quicken, and probably others as well (it's supposed to be pretty compatible).

Good luck!

[trolleypup.livejournal.com]

Heh. From time to time I run "barebones" machines...all the removable chassis parts removed...at that point you really don't need the chassis fan, just the CPU fan and the PSU fan and (usually) the video card fan. Depending on the engineering of the case, the chassis fan may be unneeded anyway...if the case is vented correctly, the PSU fan may be able to exhaust the warm air without leaving any hot stagnant areas inside the case...of course, the case has to be closed for this to work.[1]

If your motherboard controls the fan speed based on temperature, you may want to adjust the minimum fan speed to prevent stalling.

[1] I actually had to close up several chassis vents on my current box to get this sort of air flow, since I don't run my machine hard and I didn't want to listen to 4 fans running all the time. *checks PSU vent* a bare whisper of air at barely body temperature...I do, however, have my motherboard set to underclock the CPU when it isn't working hard...if I start editing whacking big images, the volume and temperature of air goes up.

[threeringedmoon.livejournal.com]

Jack's been using gnucash for our household accounts. I don't hear him complain, but can't offer much else.