Joseph Fisher

As promised, here’s the link to my presentation at the 2012 Rock Eagle Computing Conference: Leveraging Active Directory Group Policy to Patch Common Windows Applications

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to post a comment on this page.

One person had asked about doing reporting via GPO. I’m not sure of what (if any) native AD support there is for doing inventory reporting. We ended up using OCS Inventory to track machines, and deployed the agent via GPO.

After several weeks of random blue screen crashes, I finally broke down and examined the event logs to see why my OS kept borking out. With a short google of the stop error, I found that my computer was overheating, causing it to randomly shut down in an effort to keep my CPU from melting. This was a shocker to me, as I purposefully bought one of the best cases for cooling available. After cracking open the side, I quickly realized that 2 years worth of dust had clogged my CPU’s heatsink, and covered all the components inside like the first snowfall of the season. I emptied a can of compressed air in an effort to de-dustify everything, but I was still seeing idle temps in the high 40′s. Enough was enough, and I decided to pull the trigger on the Noctura DH-14 that I’d been eyeing ever since I built this system 2 years ago.

This thing is MASSIVE. It’s easily 4 times the size of the stock heatsink and fan for my AMD Phenom II. In fact, I had to look up on Noctura’s site to see that it would even fit in my case, and with my RAM. Some RAM heatsinks are too tall to accommodate the Noctura. I was a little worried as I have Ripjaws RAM with the fancy looking headspreader, but luckily it was on the compatibility list. I still held my breath a bit at installation, but thankfully I had a few millimeters of space once everything was attached.

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