Mark's Expeditions in Technology and Life

In a previous post, link , I talked about my home media server. Since that post, the server described decided to take a permanent vacation. Since its departure was sudden and surprising, it will be sorely missed. The journey required to replace it was both fun and frustrating. It also gave me an opportunity to teach my wife a little bit about how computers are made. Since every journey begins with a step, let us take the first one together. The server was running perfectly as I was applying a security patch. Upon reboot however, the system decided that it did not want to post. After some troubleshooting, and removing one stick of RAM, the system was able to boot. While this was a step in the right direction, it was not a solution. Withing five minutes, the system would freeze and require a hard reset. After the hard reset, the system would not post. So some more in depth testing was needed. In order to this testing, I needed another system that used DDR3 for RAM and used the LGA-115...

I must apologize for the lack of content lately. In the last month I had problems with my Android TV in the bedroom overheating and then my home server decided to go on a permanent vacation. The server was an easy fix, but the Android TV took some time. Today, I would like to talk about my Android TV fix. While the solution I came up with was not as elegant as it could be, it was fun to do and a learning experience for me. In my previous post link , I talked about my Home Media Center setup. In my bedroom, I stated that I was using a Memobox Q-Box Android TV that I had purchased from Aliexpress, link . This little piece of hardware is pretty good for the price that you pay. The only problem I was having with it was heat. The box would get very hot during use. Hot enough, that the quad-core processor would slow its speed to try and cool itself off. This is called "thermal throttling". Thermal throttling is normal with modern processors. Both desktop and mobile processors use...