My friend’s LCD monitor stopped working a few weeks ago. It would come on for a few seconds and then just go blank. I decided to shine my flashlight at it at a sharp angle to see if it was completely broken or if the back light wasn’t working. As I suspected the back light was burned out, but other wise it was fine. Then we got creative. Why throw out a monitor simply because a light stopped working? Soon, we created the contraption that you see above. We took out all of the internal parts and put them into a milk crate. We found a desk lamp to use as a back light. Although this won’t really work as a desktop monitor it might very well find a home in my currently monitor-less sever closet. Without the back lights the monitor only draws 7 watts per hour.
Computers
backlight, broken, LCD, monitor
After overclocking my system I ran a stress test in order to make sure that even during the heaviest of loads my server would stay functional. My application of choice for stress testing in Ubuntu is “cpuburn”. I then use lm-sensors to read the temperatures of my system.
$apt-get install cpuburn lm-sensors
$sudo sensors-detect
$sudo modprobe [modules that the previous command identified at the end]
$sensors
At this point you can now see the temperatures, voltage regulations, fan speeds, and other such information. Now you need to open new terminal window for each CPU core you have (or create them using Screen) and run the following command in each one:
$burnP6
Let this run for at least 15 minutes and then check the temperatures by running “sensors”. You can also set up sensors to automatically update by using the “watch” command.
$watch sensors
Computers, How To
cpu, test, ubuntu