It'll Never Fly

As I mentioned last time, the fan on my ATI X800 XT is wearing out, causing all kinds of lovely “derka derka” noises in my otherwise quiet G5. Thank the gods for my MacBook, which has allowed me to keep the times I power up the G5 to a minimum until I can get a suitable replacement fan. As I also mentioned, I ordered a Zalman replacement fan, a VF900-Cu to be exact, which came a few days after my initial post. I went through the whole rigmarole of pulling out the X800 card, swearing upon dropping the screw in the case, disassembling the old fan, cleaning the old goop off, attaching the fancy new thermal heatsinks, applying the new grease, and attaching the new fan, only to find that the handy dandy thumb screws Zalman provides on the underside of the card to tighten everything together, stick out like sore thumbs (pun intended… this is where you laugh), and because of Apple’s custom engineering and intent to waste no space, there’s no room to fit the card back in the only provided AGP slot *and* have those thumb screws on there keeping everything in place (and have the proper power provided, because Apple engineered those out of sight, too), so now I’m back to my jalopy fan (now catch your breath and marvel at how long that sentence was).

So I packed the Zalman back up, and because I’m the wuss I am, have made no attempt to return it back. Who knows? Maybe it’ll come in handy in the years to come. And that’s where things have been for the last few weeks. I’ve just been living off my MacBook, without any of my iTunes being available nor being able to play any video games.

That is, until about an hour ago. After searching high and low, looking for someplace that’ll ship an Arctic Cooling ATI Silencer 5 to Canada (or within Canada), finding mostly shitty mom and pop online stores that couldn’t ship themselves out of a paper bag, made even harder by the fact that it seems to be discontinued, I ended turning to eBay. To some of you that might have seemed to be an obvious next step, but I have a strange dislike for eBay, thinking of it more as an exhausting all my other options, snakes on a plane, last resort kind of thing.

Perhaps not unsurprisingly, in spite of all the countless fake eBay spam messages I’ve received over the years, my account was still alive and well, patiently awaiting the one day when I would once again return to buy Battle Beasts, Lego®, and D&D™ action figures. To put things in perspective, my current profile rating is a 12, collected during a flurry of activity between April 25th and July 17th, 1999. Yes, 1999. This is pre-Y2K stuff here, people.

But, alas, this evening’s visit was unfortunately not to purchase any assortment of molded plastic chunks of tomfoolery, but to find a replacement fan for my graphics card. And find one I did… in the UK.

We’ll see what happens *this* time.

Oh, and the Kensington mouse is working well. Haven’t really had a whole lot of time to use it, though, seeing as it’s to be used with my G5.

In my never ending quest for the perfect computer mouse, I bought another one just the other day. This one is the Kensington PilotMouse Mini Bluetooth (Model #72414). Kensington is a brand I’ve respected since way back during the days of pre-Mac OS X. They’re a little on the high-end, and thus a little more expensive, but their stuff is usually very well made (and pretty, which is always important for us Mac types). It’s a “mini” mouse meant for laptop use, but is on the large end of mini form factors, which suits me just fine. It’s actually quite similar in size to the original mouse that came with the Mac Plus. I have a hard time with the “full size” mice available nowadays that are giant lumps of plastic formed to fit a person’s right hand with ridges and lips and buttons all over the place (like my Logitech MX1000 Laser). I much prefer the simple symmetric rectangular shape. The way I grip my mouse is between my thumb and ring finger half-way down the sides of the mouse with my index and middle finger tips resting on the top of the mouse near the middle. I don’t rest my fingers near the front of the mouse, as most form-fitted mice are designed.

Anyway, I like the Kensington one so far. I’ve only been using it for about a day. Setup was a breeze. I popped open the battery compartment, placed in the batteries the way that was clearly marked, closed the compartment, turned on the mouse, and ran OS X’s built-in bluetooth device setup. I was up and running in a matter of seconds. It’s got a handy ribbed rubber grip that goes around the circumference of the mouse which I can only assume is for both my pleasure and my comfort. I miss the charging dock, as I’ve never been comfortable, environmentally-wise, with the idea of continually going through AA batteries. The tracking is probably not as good as my MX1000, but seriously, how much accuracy do I need to surf and check e-mails?

And in other computer accessory news, I’ve ordered a replacement fan for my ATI Radeon X800 XT, as the ATI one on there has started to wear out. About a week before I left on my vacation, the fan on the card started to make a winding noise, much like ED-209 did after it fell down the stairs in Robocop. I fiddled with it a bit and noticed it was a little loose and wobbling. After a few hopeless attempts to tighten it, I’ve now got it to the point where it’s quieter, but rattles, making a sound more like Archie’s jalopy. I’ve ordered a Zalman fan from NCIX to replace it. We’ll see how that goes.