Reply To: Power to the Pluggers and Players

[DeVaultSetter]

Right now, using a “low-impact” customer power plan, as for the keystrokes, unfortunately the Prodigy has no power button! The PC chassis is endowed with one hence an unswerving reliance on that. 😛
The power plan includes a hybrid sleep which keeps the fans spinning, followed by full hibernation after 60 minutes. Thing is, if it’s not hibernated by command, the rig does actually power up intermittently during hibernation, and, after around 10-15 seconds, (realising it’s “supposed” to be off) turns itself off again! Consequently, this poor user has lent himself to falling into the marvelous rhythm of shutting the “****” thing down once a day, an arrangement the machine and human can come to terms with, at least on an “equal” basis. 😛
Will be planning to surf the UEFI sometime, a minor tweak at best (said Nervous Nellie to Cautious Conrad.)

Moving on to other issues bouncing in on the spectrum, the first was an ongoing going issue with FTA digital from the antennae, “solved” by power reset on the amplifier. A friend suggested boosting the antennae signal which entails more spaghetti and expense so probably just have to live with it.

A slightly more disturbing occurrence is the effect of the new rig on the AM/FM radio reception at the other end of the room. The task now being what component in the PC is the cause – another use case it turned out to be a fan described in this old thread. In which case, here it could be the Cryorig QF120 LED Silent Series 120mm PWM Fan installed as an extra. These days many are pointing their RFI fingers at PSUs, the one here is a Cooler Master MWE Gold FM 650W Power Supply with about the same throughput as the one in the old rig.
To help diagnosing the issue (apart from spectrum analysers and the like) is what type of sound the RFI produces on the radio. Here it’s just a static buzz, not at constant pitch, as it modulates to the voices and music in broadcast. A site which offers different types of RFI sounds of computers is this, if only there were more samples from other components like fans and PSUs. In any case, a great resource for Sounds and Music! 🙂
Here’s a very good read-up on RFI

UPSing the ante yet again is the upstairs 1200 VA Eaton UPS: 5S1200AU, old (early 2017) so only the manual is hosted now, which does the job, sort of, except the USB unit control codes can no longer be read by the installed driver software, presumably because something got fried. Well, there are connect alerts (every ~3-4 mins) when a USB ommunication port is connected to the UPS. Hard to diagnose, as it started to do this while diagnosing software freeze-UPS back in ’21. One could re-install the driver at connect, and things would work, however the process had to be repeated every bootup. Regrettable, as Eaton Tech Support were very much on the side of accentuating the turn on/turn off/ install/uninstall approach, with little regard for other methods e.g. USB Analyzer.
And to cap it all off, attempted to register in order to become one of the family, rather miffed at the return email:

Thank you for contacting Eaton.

 

We regret to inform you that your request has been denied. Further inquiries should be directed to your Power Systems Administrator or your Eaton Contact.

 

Sincerely,

Eaton Access Request Management

🙁