15th February 2000

The great thing about having geeky friends is that they may know something you don't; while you may have mastered Napster, good ol' Christine may have TCP/IP under her thumb. Lucky for me, David did something I wasn't expecting while he was visiting; he put an older CD-ROM into Mr. Bigglesworth to make CD burning more efficient. Before putting the case back together, he removed a couple of metal tabs (once covering separate PCI slots). Being the curious sort, I asked why. "Cooling," he answered. "Oh." That makes sense, actually. Yes, ya gotta keep your internal hardware clean, but when you have too much of it, heat becomes an issue. Random OS lockups and irregular program crashes will ensue if things get too hot in the kitchen. Before buying another heatsink or fan, try removing a couple of tabs. Or, if you're CAREFUL, keep the cover off your case to keep it cool.