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The HAPCC general meeting is on 4th Sunday of each month.
This month June 28th. Meeting time 7:00 - 9:00 pm. The HAPCC has
a meeting place at: Maritime Museum of the Atlantic 1675 Lower
Water Street , Halifax, NS.
Parking available in the nearby Government parking lot or in
the Museum parking lot. Access to the building is via the Night
Entrance Doors, located just to the right of the regular front
doors. If door is locked, use the bell on upper left side of the
Night Entrance Doors.
The meeting room is on the second floor and has a theatre
type of layout. Washrooms are located close by. Elevator service
is available. Coffee served.
Our guest speaker this month, will be from Microsoft. You've read about how Microsoft
Windows 98 works better and plays better. Now be one of the first
User Groups to get a sneak peek at all of the cool, new features
in Microsoft Windows 98 first hand from a Microsoft Canada
product representative.
Check out the cool new features inWindows 98 that will make your computer faster, smarter and
easier to use.
Special Note: Because of the "greater than normal" attendance we expect for this month's meeting, we are obliged to "register" attendee's in order that we do not overfill our meeting room. All club members with email addresses should have received by now a direct mailing explaining this. If you have not, please email to: mips@ns.sympatico.ca with the subjectWin98 and in the body state your attendance intentions. If you wish to bring a guest, please add their name. Club members will have priority reservation status, but we would appreciate an early indication of your plans to attend.
Rob MacCara - Over Clocking
Bill Marchant - More on Y2K
General Information
A word of thanks to guest speakers and the their web sites.
News Letter Information
Meeting schedule for the year
What I'm going to discuss tonight, is a basic
rundown on what over clocking is, why you should or should not do
it, how to do it (with relative safety), and the important
precautions that you should take to help ensure the long life
you'd expect from such a small and expensive component.
What is over clocking?
Simply put, over clocking is the process of
running your system faster than the speed its been rated for.
Why should you over clock?
The biggest reason it to extract the maximum
performance possible from your system while minimizing the risk
of system instability - which can be a real concern when pushing
the limits!
The advantages are even greater today with over
clocking as newer motherboards have more "built-in"
ways to help over clocking - which yield much higher gains than
just increasing the clock frequency like the "old days" method.
Why should you not over clock?
In most cases, no physical harm will come to your
computer - worst case is the machine will lock up upon boot up,
or be so unstable that you have to reboot and rethink your over
clocking strategy. The real danger lies in the long term
effects to the internals of your CPU. The increased
voltages/frequencies (heat) placed upon the CPU can over the long
term slowly deteriorate the chip and shorten it's lifespan.
We will touch upon how to combat this problem shortly.
Four requirements for over clocking
The first is the CPU. The easiest/best chips
to over clock are the Intel Pentium. The competition (AMD,
Cyrix & IBM) works harder to make a better chip, and thus
their tolerances are much closer than Intel's. In most
cases, the Intel cpu's are all basically the same, the better
quality ones (the ones that passed the heat tests with flying
colours) are the ones that are rated for the higher speeds.
There are a few Intel cpu's that have been modified to disallow
multiplier settings of greater than 2x - so avoid these.
The telltale clue will be the "SY022" stamped on the
chip. The other thing to look for to avoid would be a
re-marked cpu (Intel doesn't do this themselves - it means you've
bought a fake or already over clocked chip! The
competition's chips are built for a speed rating, and that's what
they're meant to run at no matter what! But there are still a few
gains to be made. Wait for it!
Second requirement is the motherboard.
Obviously, the better quality motherboard, the
better your chance of success will be. Things to look for
in the motherboard are multiple bus frequencies ie. 66, 75 &
83MHz, and multiple voltage settings in incremental steps.
The better the motherboard, the less likely you will experience
dirty signals on the system bus - this works both ways, as the
faster the cpu runs, the more likely it is to introduce dirty
signals, and the faster the motherboard runs, the more likely it
is to run unstably.
A new wrinkle in all this comes with the new
motherboards that have 100MHz busses on them. Imagine that!
Already over clocked! You will find this new faster bus
speed on Pentium II motherboards with the BX chipset. As
well, there are a couple of Socket 7 motherboards (now called
Super Socket 7) that have the 100MHz bus along with an
Accelerated Graphics Port or AGP, which when coupled to a fast
(300MHz) AMD cpu, turns out to be a very fast computer! I
have one of these on order right now, so perhaps I can give an
update at the next meeting or post my findings on the web version
newsletter if you're interested.
Third requirement is RAM
Almost any EDO RAM rated at 60 or 70nsec will work
just fine at a bus speed of 66 MHz. Now once you start to
increase bus speeds, the quality of the memory is crucial.
If you are using SDRAM which is rated at 10nsec, you will have
better success at the higher clocked bus frequencies. On a
motherboard with the new 100MHz bus, the ram requirements are
much, much more stringent. 100MHz memory can cost as much
as $100 more than it's slower 66MHz rated cousins! If your
goal is to have the fastest possible running machine, this should
be the memory you're looking for. Last requirement is Cooling
This is the one area that cannot be stressed
enough! Think Cooling, Cooling, and more Cooling. Don't
think that a plain heat sink without a fan will do the job.
Won't happen (for long, at least!) Look for the biggest
heat sink with a powerful fan on top. The bigger the
better. If your system seems to work ok, but crashes after
a few minutes, then the most likely culprit is the cooling
department. It will certainly cost a few bucks more for the
"deluxe large size heatsink/fan" but certainly it's
worth it. Do not skimp here!
Now to the good stuff - How To
To restate the purpose of over clocking, we want
to speed up the system without making it unstable, and of course,
we don't want to toast any components...
The very best way to speed things up, is to
increase the bus speed. Now, your motherboard may or may not
support this. If it does, change the 60MHz jumper to 66MHz
or the 66MHz jumper to 75MHz. An example here is if you
have a Pentium 150, change the 60MHz bus speed from 60 to
66MHz. This is a fairly safe and easy upgrade to do.
Almost all P150's can run as a P166. A side effect or going from
66 to 75 (or greater) MHz might be that some PCI cards (or ram)
may not be happy with this increased speed. If you can't change
the bus speed, change the multiplier instead. Don't try to
decrease the bus speed and then increase the multiplier,
though. Overall speed probably won't change and it could
make it slower.
Second choice for over clocking is to change the
multiplier. Inside the CPU is a clock multiplier which is set via
jumpers on the motherboard and is programmed to the CPU through
pins on the CPU. Standard multipliers are 1.5, 2, 2.5, and
3x for Intel Pentium. PentiumPros support 2.5, 3, 3.5 and
4x. Some BIOSs allow you to make this change from the setup
screens, but chances are you'll be stuck opening the case and
looking for little jumpers hiding under a ribbon cable or tucked
in neatly behind a drive bay!
Last choice (and certainly least best) is to
change the CPU supply voltage. Big problem here is
cooling. Remember the cooling warning? If the CPU
doesn't seem to run reliably at a higher frequency, try
increasing the supply voltage. But don't forget the increase
cooling demands. Intel CPU's can run at voltages of up to
4½ volts. This would be an extreme choice of operating
voltage! Kids don't try this at home! You might also
try changing from Standard to VRE voltage - which will give a
cleaner signal to the CPU due to the digital quality signals.
In a nutshell, what we've discussed so far is:
Here are some sample over clocking choices:
If you've read this far, you're probably ready for to over clock! Here's a quick rundown on how to go about it.
In the past, computer hardware and software systems assumed a "date window" running from 1900 to
1999. This is the basis of the Y2K problem.
Microsoft Windows products of all versions and kinds have not been exceptions to this. Before panic sets in,
I should hasten to mention that the solution to nearly all Y2K problems with stand alone PCs is to make all year
entries in the 21st century four digit years. (This assumes that you believe the 21st century begins at one minute
past midnight on Jan 1 year 2000.)
More permanent relief is available, and may even now be resident on your computer. Some recent versions of
Windows have adopted a date window running from 1930 to 2029. In fact, checking my own rather old version of
Windows 95 I find that it is using this new date window. Here is how to check your
own computer. There is a .DLL file called OLEaut32. (The OLE Automation Library) This file, for whatever reason known
only to Microsoft, contains the control for the date window. The file is in the Windows\System folder. Look in
Windows Explorer and you will see it there. Right click on the file name, and select
"Properties" from the dialogue box. Then select "Version". According to a recent article in PC
Magazine, if the version number is 2.20.4049 or larger, then your system is using the revised date window. Mine is
2.20.4054, so I guess I can go another 30 years without having to worry.
You might have this file, not from your original Windows install, but from a subsequent install
of Internet Explorer 3.0, Office 97, Visual Basic 5.0 or some other products.
Chairperson David Potter
Vice-Chair Bill Marchant
Treasurer Rob MacCara
Web Librarian Thayne MacLean
Newsletter Editor Diane Smith
Membership Promotion Pat Conen
and the following members who assist in planning our monthly
meetings: Norman DeForest, Henry Hill, Ken Gilmour,and Colin Stuart.
The HAPCC has two kinds of meetings. Firstly the regular
Sunday night meeting which most members attend regularly,
secondly the monthly (approximately) planning meeting which
organizes the business of the Club, including what happens on the
Sundays. The planning meeting is held on Monday, a week after the
regular meeting in which all members of the Club are urged to
attend. At the planning meeting, we discuss feature speakers for
regular meetings, finances, membership, training, and other
computer related subjects.
....Bill Marchant
Our guest speaker at the March meeting was Mr.
David Baxter, Product Specialist at MT&T for the MpoweredPc
service. His multi-media presentation showed us how far the
service has come, and in which direction it is heading.
MpoweredPc was being officially launched on April 7, 1998 and it
promises to be a serious contender in the high-speed
internet/software on demand arena. More info can be found here:
Mpowered. Once again, Thank you to MT&T and David Baxter.
Our guest speaker in February was Sgt. Bill
Cowper, Internet Communications Officer of the Halifax Regional
Municipality Police Department. He gave a history of how and when
the police department started using the Internet. They were the
first police department in Canada to be on the Internet. Sgt.
Cowper is continually receiving calls from all over the world
looking for assistance. The presentation showed how well the
department and the officers in the patrol cars are versed on
getting the criminals off the streets. If you would like to
check-out their web site the address is
Halifax
Regional Police Service gives an idea
of what an "Internet Cybercop" is all about.
Newsletter Articles.... We are almost always in need of good
articles. If anyone has something that they feel would make a
good article, an interesting story to tell, or even a good
meeting topic, please don't hesitate to pass it on. Articles can
be submitted in almost any format, ASCII text, AMI Pro, MS Word,
Windows Write, WordStar and of course WordPerfect.
The news letter is mailed to all paid up members and to
anyone who has attended a meeting within the past three months.
Yearly membership dues are $15.00.
Club Mailing Address -
P.O. Box 29008, Halifax N.S., B3L 4T8.
In this issue
We decide the meeting dates for the upcoming year at the last
planning meeting of the season. The dates for these are listed
below. As in previous years, the December meeting is moved to the
early part of January due to Christmas Eve being near the fourth
Sunday of the month.
The planning meetings are normally held on the
second Monday (8 days) after the general meeting. They are
currently held at a members home and the address is announced at
the meeting prior to the planning meeting. Anyone is welcome to
assist in the planning of future meetings or events. Meeting
dates for the 1998/99 season:
Sept-27 Oct-25 Nov-22 Jan-3 Jan-31 Feb-28 Mar-28 Apr-25 May-24 June-27
Any changes to the scheduled dates will be announced where possible at the regular monthly meetings and/or in this newsletter.
