Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology
One should not do a new PC build in the middle of a heatwave if you do not want to be concerned about how fast fans are spinning and how hot things are getting. Yet, that is what I did last month after delaying the act for numerous months.
My efforts mean that I have a system built around an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X CPU and a Gigabyte X570 Aorus Pro with 64 GB of memory and things are settling down after the initial upheaval. That also meant some adjustments to the CPU fan profile in the BIOS for quieter running while the the use of Be Quiet! Dark Rock 4 cooler also helps as does a Be Quiet! Silent Wings 3 case fan. All are components from trusted brands though I wonder how much abuse they got during their installation and subsequent running in.
Fan noise is a non-quantitative indicator of heat levels as much as touch so more quantitative means are in order. Aside from using a thermocouple device, there are in-built sensors too. My using Linux Mint means that I have the sensors command from the lm-sensors package for checking on CPU and other temperatures though hddtemp is what you need for checking on the same for hard drives. The latter can be used as follows:
sudo hddtemp /dev/sda /dev/sdb
This has to happen using administrator access and a list of drives needs to be provided because it cannot find them by itself. In my case, I have no mechanical hard drives installed in non-NAS systems and I even got to replacing a 6 TB Western Digital Green disk with an 8 TB SSD but I got the following when I tried checking on things with hddtemp:
WARNING: Drive /dev/sda doesn't seem to have a temperature sensor.
WARNING: This doesn't mean it hasn't got one.
WARNING: If you are sure it has one, please contact me ([email protected]).
WARNING: See --help, --debug and --drivebase options.
/dev/sda: Samsung SSD 870 QVO 8TB: no sensor
The cause of the message for me was that there is no entry for Samsung SSD 870 QVO 8TB in /etc/hddtemp.db so that needed to be added there. Before that could be rectified, I needed to get some additional information using smartmontools and these needed to be installed using the following command:
sudo apt-get install smartmontools
What I needed to do was check the drive’s SMART data output for extra information and that was achieved using the following command:
sudo smartctl /dev/sda -a | grep -i Temp
What this does is to look for the temperature information from smartctl output using the grep command with output from the first being passed to the second through a pipe. This yielded the following:
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0032 072 050 000 Old_age Always - 28
The first number in the above (190) is the thermal sensor’s attribute identifier and that was needed in what got added to /etc/hddtemp.db. The following command added the necessary data to the aforementioned file:
echo \"Samsung SSD 870 QVO 8TB\" 190 C \"Samsung SSD 870 QVO 8TB\" | sudo tee -a /etc/hddtemp.db
Here, the output of the echo command was passed to the tee command for adding to the end of the file. In the echo command output, the first part is the name of the drive, the second is the heat sensor identifier, the third is the temperature scale (C for Celsius or F for Fahrenheit) and the last part is the label (it can be anything that you like but I kept it the same as the name). On re-running the hddtemp command, I got output like the following so all was as I needed it to be.
/dev/sda: Samsung SSD 870 QVO 8TB: 28°C
Since then, temperatures may have cooled and the weather become more like what we usually get but I am still keeping an eye on things, especially when the system is put under load using Perl, R, Python or SAS. There may be further modifications such as changing the case or even adding water cooling, not least to have a cooler power supply unit, but nothing is being rushed as I monitor things to my satisfaction.
Due to a need to access websites with country blocking, I have decided to give CyberGhost a go and it also will come in handy when connecting devices to other Wi-Fi connections. What I have got is the three year subscription package and all went went well on the first day of use. However, things became unusable on the second and a reboot did not sort it.
The problem seemed to affect a phone running Android too and I even got to suspecting my router an broadband provider. Even terminating the subscription came to mind but it did not come to that. Instead, I did a bit more research and tried changing the maximum transition unit (MTU) for the connection to 1300 as suggested in a CyberGhost help article. Using the Control Panel meant that it was resetting to 1500 on my Windows 10 machine so I then turned to a command line based solution.
To do that, I started PowerShell in administrator mode from the context menu produced by right clicking on the Start Menu icon on the taskbar. Then, I entered the following command to see what connections I had and what the MTU settings were:
netsh interface ipv4 show subinterfaces
From looking through the Settings and Control Panel applications, I already had worked out what network interface belonged to the CyberGhost connection. Seeing that the MTU setting was 1500, I then issued a command like the following to change that to 1300.
netsh interface ipv4 set subinterface "<name of ethernet interface>" mtu=1300 store=persistent
Here, <name of ethernet interface> gets replace by the name of your connection and the string is quoted to avoid spaces in the name causing problems with executing the command. Once that second command had been run, the first one was issued again and the output checked to ensure that the MTU setting was as expected.
This was done when the VPN connection was inactive but it may work also with an active connection. After making the change, I again reconnected to the VPN and all has been as expected since then and I found a better connection for my Android phone too.
Recently, I managed to use 10AppsManager to remove most of the in-built apps from a Windows 10 virtual machine that I have for testing development versions in case anything ugly were to appear in a production update. Curiosity is my excuse for letting the tool do what it did and some could do with restoration. Out of the lot, Windows Store is the main one that I have sorted so far.
The first step of the process was to start up PowerShell in administrator mode. On my system, this is as simple as clicking on the relevant item in the menu popped up by right clicking on the Start Menu button and clicking on the Yes button in the dialogue box that appears afterwards. In your case, it might be a case of right clicking on the appropriate Start Menu programs entry, selecting the administrator option and going from there.
With this PowerShell session open, the first command to issue is the following:
Get-Appxpackage -Allusers > c:\temp\appxpackage.txt
This creates a listing of Windows app information and pops it into a text file in your choice of directory. Opening the text file in Notepad allows you to search it more easily and there is an entry for Windows Store:
Name : Microsoft.WindowsStore
Publisher : CN=Microsoft Corporation, O=Microsoft Corporation, L=Redmond, S=Washington, C=US
Architecture : X64
ResourceId :
Version : 11607.1001.32.0
PackageFullName : Microsoft.WindowsStore_11607.1001.32.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe
InstallLocation : C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\Microsoft.WindowsStore_11607.1001.32.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe
IsFramework : False
PackageFamilyName : Microsoft.WindowsStore_8wekyb3d8bbwe
PublisherId : 8wekyb3d8bbwe
PackageUserInformation : {S-1-5-21-3224249330-198124288-2558179248-1001
IsResourcePackage : False
IsBundle : False
IsDevelopmentMode : False
Dependencies : {Microsoft.VCLibs.140.00_14.0.24123.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe,
Microsoft.NET.Native.Framework.1.3_1.3.24201.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe,
Microsoft.NET.Native.Runtime.1.3_1.3.23901.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe,
Microsoft.WindowsStore_11607.1001.32.0_neutral_split.scale-100_8wekyb3d8bbwe}
Using the information from the InstallLocation field, the following command can be built and executed (here, it has gone over several lines so you need to get your version onto a single one):
Add-AppxPackage -register “C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\Microsoft.WindowsStore_11607.1001.32.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe\AppxManifest.xml” -DisableDevelopmentMode
Once the above has completed, the app was installed and ready to use again. As the mood took me, I installed other apps from the Windows Store as I saw fit.