It's been more than 16 months since I bought my first, and still one-and-only laptop, Asus F3Jc (lain). And even if most ppl say Asus is synonym for crappy hardware prone to failure, I still like it ^.^.

It has dedicated graphics (gf 7300go), nice connectivity (bt and 802.11 a/b/g) and mainly VTX enabled Core 2 \^^/ (t5600).

Only thing that annoyed me lately was that it was getting little more noisy and hot than I would like. And since I bought myself new tube of thermal paste as a xmas gift from a3c, I decided to peek inside and clean/re-paste everything possible.

Theres only one way to describe the result:

Huge success111

before pasting:
idle: 43°C, fan around ~1800rpm
full load: 74°C, fan running madly

after pasting:
idle: 39°C, fan is turned off
full load: 54°C, fan running at 1800rpm \^^/

Some pictures should be in gallery, but don't expect more than PDA quality.

update:
In meantime (between writing this post and remembering to publish it) I've opened another two notebooks, Asus A6R and HP nx8220, for pretty much same reasons...

And judging from what I saw inside, I must say that my Asus F3Jc has much robust cooling system than HP and without any noticeable weight difference. I just don't believe that some 0.3mm aluminum thermal plate can be enough to cool dedicated graphics and chipset. That also explains why the HP was so loud when my second cousin tried to play Oblivion on that machine.

But having notebook from HP also has its positives, ie. that cool maintenance manual that really comes in handy when you try to get to the heatsink... juts too many hidden screws ^^.

Last week in my bofh-like work (#1) was about `portupgrade`-ing, getting stuff out of jammed printers and stuff...

At a time when i spent a pretty much time upgrading my '''m4d freecell skillz''', my eye (or feet?) laid on some forgotten old PC under the desk. I was too lazy to find someone with keys to storage room so I've decided make some backup server from it and keep it lying under the desk for future generations
*hh, owner will be pretty surprised when he finds out his machine is running OpenBSD*

Old AT PSU was dead so I switched it with some ATX one lying nearby (luckily mobo was AT/ATX combo).

Main problem arised when I tried to boot it up. Mobo didn't had (or at least I wasn't able to find it) any 'soft power-up' pins on it. *sigh* But solution came just few moments after.

Whenever you need to run ATX PSU without motherboard, short-circuit green cable with any of the black ones (ground).

I'm not sure of any side-effects of this, but machine already has uptime of few days.

BTW: you could also try use this solution to keep some older ATX systems without 'boot up after power loss' setting in BIOS running all the time. let me know if u've tried this one ^^

BTW^2: I'm not responsible for any damage caused to you and/or your property. ^^`