Halleynet Headspace

Flying back home on Squeezyjet the other week there, I was listening to the cabin crew do their usual safety speil (as you do) and they got to the section where they say:

“In the event of a loss of cabin pressure, oxygen will be provided, a mask like this will fall from the panel above, pull it to your face  and by doing so the oxygen supply will be activated. Secure your mask before helping others with theirs….” You know the bit?

Anyway it occurred to me that with Easyjet, Ryanair and no doubt others looking for more ways to extract revenue from their passengers a new ploy could be forthcoming. Don’t forget that many “pleasures” you used to take for granted are now no longer free… they are subject to you paying extra.

• If you fancy queuing longer- pay extra to stand near the front for half an hour before the flight is called : speedy boarding

• If you want something to eat on board, the “easy kisok” will come round offering you food and drink- please have the correct change

• If you want to take a bag with you (as if!) eh, that will be a tenner please…. each way….

• If you want to have a pee, em a pound (Ryanair- well at least they were threatening this- dunno if they did it as I would rather piss on their seat than give them anything more quite frankly- Dick Turpin and all that.)

• If youwant to pay on line with a credit card (no- I would rather pay cash- how do I do that?) there will be a credit card charge…..

• Feeling lucky- buy an easyjet scratch card and win a notional £20 to spend in the easy shop, where the cheapest item is £21, (obviously this entails you spending a £1 on the scratch card, then spening more money to extract the value for the prize- money you would otherwise never have spent) Why on earth woul dyou want to buy a platic orange airbus jet model, or a bear in a flying jacket……

You get the picture…..

Anyway how about this one

“In the event of a loss of cabin pressure, oxygen may be provided, a mask like this will fall from the panel above, pull it to your face .  Easy card plus holders will continue to breathe reasonably normally. The cabin crew will come around to  assist, and will offer to actually turn on the oxygen supply for a mere £15.

You  are reminded by prebooking you can save ££££’s. Prebooking your oxygen supply will only cost you £5 or £7 return.

Why not purchase easy breathing plus our annual oxygen supply card for only £100.

Customers choosing not to purchase our oxygen plan, em, might hallucinate wildly, and ultimately , em,….. die.

Please be aware Easyjet operate a no dying policy, passengers so doing will be refused carriage and may be evacuated from the aircraft over the first stretch of open water we encounter. Please  make sure you are wearing clothing that is unlikely to tear in the event of cabin crew having to lift you by it and throw you from the cargo hatch.

We do hope you have a pleasant flight………”

If you drop by regularly you may notice some weird stuff going on withthe layout of this page. I am currently working on a new layout and when I have it active for development work things may appear out of place. In the meantime I have this temporary “stock” style in place. Please bear with me while I get it sorted, time is rather precious at the moment and its only when I have some that i can update this.

I noticed a “Chip fan” warning on my sons PC this morning at boot time and decided to investigate. Looks like it was as well I did as the fan that cools the northbridge/sli chip on the motherboard itself (an Asus A8N Sli Deluxe)  was not running.

I tried giving ht emachine a good dust out including the fan but no life was seen. You could smell burning though when it was switched on, so I pretty well gave up hope for the fan and was cursing the whole thing, as it coul dmean a complete motherboard/CPU/RAM upgrade to sort. Not a big deal technically but a pain in the backside financially when the PC is otherwise fine.

I decided to have a look see if I could fix it.

Its a bit tricky to get out and basically I needed to remove all the motherboard securing screws to get to the back of the board and the two retaining plugs that hold the fan on the chip. The only way I could see to remove them was to pull each plug out from the borad one at a time against the spring tension of the securing pillars on the front of the board, and cut them with side cutters.

This causes the retaining pillars to ping off  so watch out for losing them and the springs. Its going to be hard to resuse them but watch the springs don’t end up trapped in amongst the components onthe bard and cause further problems.

The Fan comes out once the pins are released and the power plug needs to be removed from the board.

Its held closed by 4 tiny cross head screws (a very small phillips will be required) then once the cover is off the fan is secired to the bottom of the heatsink with three further similarly sized screws.

I got these out and gave the whole assembly a really good dowse in Electrical Solvent cleaner. This certainly got it clean but it did not feel especially free spinning.

I had a wee trawl on the web and it seems this is a very common fault and the general recommendation is to replace it with a Zalman ZM-NB47J Passive cooler you can get them at micro direct here in the UK. Most appear to fail early in the life of the PC, so I guess we have been luck as this board is a few years old now.

They only cost a few pounds so I decided to order one though have to admit I have doubts its going to fit as my sons PC has a pair of NVidia  graphics cards in SLI mode that are very long and I think they are going to impede the cooler. However the cooler is rotateable so I might be able to make it fit…nothing ventured nothing gained.

Anyway I decided to have a go at getting the fan going again if I could, so after the liberal cleaning in Solvent gave it another good dose of WD40 lubricant.

I cleaned off the excess, set the motherbaord back to at least power up (plugged the atx connector in) and connected the fan – just holding it in my hand. I could feel it wanted to go – it pulsed but did not turn, so I had another wee look at it, and it seemed to be a bit squint on its axis. I applied a bit pressure to try make it look more evenly mounted, and this time it fired up.

I gave it another oil and tried again, this time it seemed much faster. So time to put it all back together, connect up and apply a bit heat paste to the chip . Now I don’t have any screw to fix the cooler back to the chipset so am kind of counting on the paste and the friction of the graphics cards above the fan holding it all in place, but the warning is gone and the fan is working fast and smoothly.

I will report on the cooler when it arrives but this might have saved things for now.

Apologies that the style of this blog has reverted to default- something seems to have corrupted my cusomised look and at this point in time I cannot see what. But by reverting to default all seems to be OK again I will restore a custome look in due course though am currently quite busy with other work.

In the meantime if you want a laugh have a look at this

this isn’t too bad either