Overheating Win 10 and Bootloaders

Hardware issues with my Linux box, wanna be gaming rig.

A single Windows 10 partition is kept for a one reason; Elite:Dangerous. But for the past 6 months I’ve not been able to play, Windows crashes each time I open it up.

I know I’ve had overheating problems in the past, installed a couple of new cooling fans and heaps of silver thermal paste, but today I bit the bullet and installed a water cooling system. This passed my Linux tests; Deja Dup backup didn’t exceed 53 degrees… apparently 60 c is the max according to the motherboard manual, although I’ve seen psensor show processor temps of 80+.

Windows however was still shutting down on me… and did I mention the radiator doesn’t quite fit into my case, although the guy in the store reassured me that it would, so I can’t reattach the side panel on my rig… looks like a proper hacking rig now, although I’m resisting having the plethora of LED’s glowing, but I might have to set them all up for a geek light show 🙂

Now issue of trying to fix Win10, and this reminds me why I shy away from using Windows at home. An update keeps failing on me, Over the course of a few hours I’ve tried several guides to find a solution with zero success, so my next hypothesis to test is a clean install. This is always a pleasure and solution for Linux let’s see if Microsoft behaves the same!

One thing that makes this exercise easier than it could have been is a ‘Gigabyte’ fibre connection with unlimited data, this use to take me a couple of days!

After linking my Windows registration to a Microsoft account, I downloaded a Win10 installer, dropped it onto a USB stick, and sat back. One clean install later, everything running smooth, no shutdown issues 🙂

But I’d lost grub; downloaded a copy of Ubuntu 19.10, created a live USB with Rufus… only to find boot / grub recovery hasn’t been updated in the repository to work with this version of the OS… bugger.

Back to Win10 I found an USB Live OS dedicated to Boot Repair boot-repair-disk-64bit. This worked a treat, I was happily surprised to find a full Linux desktop IDE, and boot repair ran as expected.

All sorted, GRUB is back, all OS’s load, and I’ve downloaded Steam and Elite:Dangerous back onto Win10 and it’s running better than ever.
Next I need to try mining again and get out of the comfort zone grind of Sothis to Ceos passenger runs

After installing the cooler I’m having some niggles with the BIOS, after closing Windows all of the properties are lost, and not able to enable 8 cores
Turning off surge protection has allowed be to unleash beast mode, with 8 cores and the ability to run Virtual Box… not sure if I can smell something burning! 🙂

Let’s see what happens, might have to see if I can replace the CMOS battery

All this for one game that I could buy for the PS4 and request my save is moved, see you in the black CMDRS o7