Enginerd's Stuff

I seem to get busier that I ever thought imaginable the end of every semester and this spring is no exception. I addition to all my school work and student related duties I was offered the opportunity to take part in a private beta test of a new operating system.

For anyone that reads posts here regularly you know that I have taken quite an interest in Linux in the last few months. With this interest came a few new people I started following on twitter that share a passion for Linux. One of these people happens to be the developer responsible for maintaining the Linux Mint LXDE Distribution. He decided to start up a side project called Peppermint that is a fork of Lubuntu and Linux Mint. This is where I got to help in a small way.
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Several of the my recent updates on here have been about the desktop I just built. The whole reason I built it was because my laptop died all of a sudden and was acting really strange. I was pretty sure that it was due to a bad mother board which wasn’t worth replacing at the cost and difficulty involved. Once I had my desktop built and all my files recovered I decided to reformat the laptop just to see if it worked. Much to my surprise it fixed the problem, at least for the moment. I had vista running on it for a week or so and it started to act up again (confirming what I had originally thought).

At this point I didn’t feel comfortable selling it since I knew it had some sort of problem. Since this left it as my third computer currently I loaded LinuxMint on it just to see if I liked it. While getting things set up it dawned on me that the issues seemed to be heat related so I started looking around the internet to see just how big a job it was to get to the heat sink to clean it. As it turns out you have to completely tear it down to the motherboard to access the fan and heat sink.
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