[PLUG] another windows annoyance

[Christopher N. Deckard]

Ok, so I have my friend's computer here.  It is going through a rebuild 
phase at the moment.  Going to give her a fresh view of Linux.  Problem 
is, she needs Windows too.  I'll convert her I promise.

But here goes my woes for the evening...  I put Windows 2000 on it last 
week.  Been trying to wade through all the reboots and all of the 
patches for the different apps (the service pack for Visual Studio is 
about 140MB.)  Problem is, I'd be downloading a patch and the thing 
would just lock.  Nothing crashing or anything else.  Well, I thought 
that I had narrowed it down to a hardware problem.  I had read that when 
Intel CPUs overheat they just stop doing anything to keep themselves 
from becoming a big ball of fire.  Well, the CPU fan wasn't moving at 
all.  I figured it had burnt itself up.

Well, I took the fan off the proc and tested it with a 9 volt battery. 
Worked fine for me, and got a nice little wind through my hair.  Plugged 
the proc back in, minus the fan, and plugged the fan into the fan header 
on the mobo.  Turned it on and watched.  The fan kicked on, and I 
watched.  Made it all the way through the bios post, made it through the 
second ide controller post, loaded the win2k kernel and started to boot. 
  About half a second into the win2k boot, the fan spins down.
If that doesn't scare you as much as it did me, well, go buy an AMD 
proc, install win2k, and let your cpu overheat into a flaming processor 
of death.  Luckily intel cpus have a failsafe in case of overheating, 
AMD doesn't...

A short side note, turning of ACPI in the bios just didn't do anything. 
  In fact, it freaked out win2k enough that when it gets to that point 
in its boot, it just reboots the computer.  Very strange...

So anyway, I just decided to bypass the fan header all together and 
soldered the power and ground to the power and ground of the other case 
fan.  Now the computer is a happy camper.

Note that I don't think it did this under Win98 which ran for months 
with no problems.

So it works now.  I just thought that I'd let everyone know one other 
reason not to use windows.  I'm really contemplating skipping the ssh 
talk just to ask in front of a bunch of microsoft weanies why Windows 
2000 turns off the cpu fan and causes overall badness.

Any flames about using windows can be sent to /dev/null.

-Chris