I just want to relate an amusing story from this morning. It involves our cat.

I was just walking from my shower feeling all clean when squelch! I stepped in a fresh, warm pile of cat vomit on the lounge room floor. Lovely.

So I hopped on one leg back to the bathroom and got back in the shower to rinse the muck off my foot. Then I got some cleaning stuff and went back to deal with the mess on the floor. That is one advantage of having wooden floors, it would have been a real cleaning challenge on carpet.

Anyway, as I was heading back to the lounge room, I heard a shout. Kai had chosen that moment to get out of bed and as he was walking through the lounge room – you guessed it. So I grabbed him and carried him to the bathroom so he wouldn’t track the stuff through the house.

Finally I got both the child and the floor cleaned up before anyone else came downstairs. The cat of course did not care, he just wanted his breakfast.

Here’s a real weird issue I’m having with my computer’s power supply. My old PSU blew up last week so I went and bought a shiny new CoolerMaster “eXtreme Power” RS-430-PCAR.
Even though it cost twice as much as a generic PSU, I thought I’d get it because it claimed to be very quiet.

It was indeed fairly quiet – for the first hour. Then it started making a high-pitched squealing or whistling noise which set my teeth on edge much like fingernails down a blackboard. All the voltages tested fine and the PC was working perfectly, I just couldn’t bear to be in the same room with it because of the noise.

But now it gets even weirder. I sent the thing back under warranty. UMart were very good about it and replaced the PSU even though they said they could see no problem with it. However when I connected up the new unit, the squeal was still there. Bah!

So I tried it in my old PC where it ran perfectly for 24 hours with no squealing. The old PC’s PSU which is just a cheap Taiwanese thing, runs fine in my new PC so I have simply swapped them.

I’m guessing some kind of oscillation occurs when the PSU is loaded in a particular way depending on the type of motherboard. With all drives and stuff disconnected, it works fine on my old motherboard (an ASUS A7V266) but will squeal with my new Gigabyte 7VT600P-RZ. The squealing noise warbles when the disk is being accessed which supports the theory of the problem being related to the load. I’ve no idea what I can do about it but it just goes to show that buying brand name equipment is not always a good thing.

Here’s an odd problem. The Administrative Tools icon recently appeared on my Windows XP desktop. No idea how it got there, I must have accidentally dragged it out of the Control Panel.

Of course Windows will not let me drag it back into the Control Panel and if I try to delete it, I get "Administrative Tools is a Windows system folder and is required for Windows to run properly. It cannot be deleted."

I spent hours trying to get rid of this thing. To save you all the same trouble, let me tell you the only solution I could come up with was to drag the thing to another folder. I put it in C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop since I rarely log in as Administrator. I guess it will just have to stay there!