Computer annoyance

[cjsmith]

Last night I put more memory in my laptop, and this morning (after a "copy" that lasted all night) I upgraded its disk.

Now it makes a noise that leaves me wanting to throw it off a building.

I suppose I could undo all the changes and just quit using Firefox. It's amazing how much faster everything on this computer works when I don't use Firefox. Too bad I like Firefox.

edit: It was the disk. I have the old one back now. Great: I am now the proud owner of an expensive object that doesn't even make a good doorstop. *sigh* and this isn't even a Monday...

Comments

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

firefox might be swapping extensively - see if any of these (http://kb.mozillazine.org/Memory_Leak) measures help. also, give opera a look - the 9.0 release has some pretty nice features, though personally i still prefer firefox.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Firefox has definitely been swapping extensively. Thanks for the link!

[tmc4242.livejournal.com]

So what brand of hard drive crashed on you ?

I just had a Seagate go bad in a newly refurbed HP laptop. ( HP was great to deal with on the fix, BTW. Very painless. ) I'm hoping the failure was a fluke. The folks I know who do tech support seem to think highly of Seagate right now, but I'm keeping an eye out...

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

It didn't crash; it showed no errors at all, and was to the best of my knowledge perfectly functional. It just sounded... there was a hollow hissing noise, almost like a powerful fan, that irritated the HECK out of me. I reacted the way some people do to fingernails on a blackboard.

I wonder whether this presages a crash. Maybe it's a perfectly healthy noise for that particular drive to make. ...maybe.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

(ps: I didn't answer the brand question - had to go look. Western Digital.)

[johnreen.livejournal.com]

Are you using any extensions?

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Adblock, Greasemonkey. I haven't gone through the process of pulling them back out to see whether it's better-behaved without.

[johnreen.livejournal.com]

Adblock is known to leak memory like a sieve.

The developer's response was to give the project the middle finger and ignore us.

Use AdblockPlus. It does more, doesn't leak memory, and the developer isn't an asshole.

[tytso.livejournal.com]

Instead of adding more disk space, maybe you can add more memory? Or is your laptop maxed out on memory already?

The other thing that might be helpful is that a number of the newer laptop drives have a configuration knob where you can trade off noise and speed of disk access. If you're using linux, you can configure it using the hdparm program's -M option. To quote from the man page:

Get/set Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM) setting. Most modern harddisk drives have the ability to speed down the head movements to reduce their noise output. The possible values are between 0 and 254. 128 is the most quiet (and therefore slowest) setting and 254 the fastest (and loudest). Some drives have only two levels (quiet / fast), while others may have different levels between 128 and 254. At the moment, most drives only support 3 options, off, quiet, and fast. These have been assigned the values 0, 128, and 254 at present, respectively, but integer space has been incorporated for future expansion, should this change.

If the problem though is the whine of disk motor, there may not be much you can do about that....

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I did add more memory - the evening before I added the disk. Strictly speaking, I don't NEED more disk... yet. :-) But I have 20G in here now, the new puppy would be 80G, and I would like to not just pitch that money down the drain.

I need to try the 80 in an external enclosure to see whether it makes that noise by itself, or whether (LONG SHOT) perhaps I didn't have all the screws in properly and the fan air was whistling funny.

I need to try this AAM concept. Maybe I could stand to listen to the new disk if the noise weren't quite so prevalent. Thank you!

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I'll try that!