After-market coolers for LGA1366/1356 Xeon CPUs (on server motherboards)

This is based on a previous post I made on building a NAS server from a SuperMicro X8DTL-3F, and cuts to the chase for people who are googling for the relevant information on how to mount an after-market cooler to a LGA1366 server motherboard (a.k.a. serverboard). It covers the Cooler… Continue reading

Building a Xeon E5645 FreeNAS server with a SuperMicro X8DTL-3F

I’ve been running a small NAS server for several years using the excellent HP MicroServer N40L upgraded to 8GB RAM (officially its max, although I know some people have got it to work with 16GB), and with five WD Red 2TB drives, running FreeNAS v9. The N40L only has 4… Continue reading

ASUS X99 Deluxe-II motherboard fails to boot with code “AE”

Symptoms: When you reboot your computer which has an ASUS X99 Deluxe-II motherboard, it goes through the POST fine, but when it hands over to the OS, you get a black screen with a flashing text cursor in the top left corner. Examining the Q-code display on the motherboard shows… Continue reading

Outlook 2003 “Reduced Functionality” mode workaround.

I stopped using Microsoft Office years ago, having switched to LibreOffice instead. LibreOffice does everything I need, and can open all my old Word and Excel documents, so I haven’t really missed Microsoft Office. However, I still have Outlook 2003 installed in order to read archived emails residing in a… Continue reading