Higher temperatures exacerbate a problem known as Electromigration.  In the simplest of terms, electromigration is a result of the movement  of electrons over a rough surface.  IC’s or integrated circuits have small imperfections in the metal connections into the semiconductors.  These imperfections are similar to a pothole or a crack in a roadway.  The harder the car rides over the pothole, the more likely the car is to break a chunk of the road off and enlarge the pothole.  The worse this hole becomes, the more cars hit it harder even if their speed is lowered.

The worsening of the imperfection accelerates the destruction of the metal connector.  In a perfect conductor the road surface is perfect, with no bumps or imperfections.  In cheap electronics the road surface is already marked with many holes.  This is also why high quality electronics have a better chance of surviving massive power surges.  The higher quality the path the more likely it is to survive the equivalent of a tank battalion driving over it.  It might be damaged by the process, but it is much more likely to survive the encounter and still function for a while longer.

What heat does to this problem, is it makes the road brittle by stretching it out a bit.  The pieces of road are much more likely to break off when hit because they aren’t being hung onto as well as they used to be.  In silicon the thermal barrier is a specific temperature.  Up until a certain point the acceleration is very low.  Once that point is reached the problem expands rapidly.

For bulk silicon this thermal limit is about 80 Degrees Celsius, in Strained Silicon or SOI this is closer to 90 or 95 Degrees.  Proper cooling can help keep your electronics running better, for longer.  This is because the migration won’t occur all at one time and can be extremely difficult to diagnose as it progresses.  The main sign is an intermittent error or failure that can be temporarily remedied by lowering the temperature or the voltage to the part.

In my case I had an old Core 2 Duo e6300.  This was an old 1.86ghz dual core processor, when I needed more power I ramped it up to almost 3.3ghz which is a huge overclock even with the additional cooling I was using.  It lasted for about a year at this level before it killed the motherboard I was using, which was an Asus p5k-se.  The motherboard failure put more stress on the chip, which would now only clock up to about 2.7 ghz.  Any higher and the system would blue screen inside Windows.  Eventually it wound down to about 2.2 ghz max clock and I replaced and retired it.  This chip was headed to its eventual end, cpu’s are designed with about a 10 year operational limit in mind.  By increasing the load on the chip and increasing the heat it was generating I accelerated its eventual death.  It still lasted a good 4 years, but this was a first hand example for me the destructive side effects of electromigration.

So, just today I sent in my old iPhone 3G to a place that buys used iPhones, iPods, laptops, etc.  I got $95 for it, which isn’t bad, considering I got a lot of use out of it, and it’s just been sitting collecting dust.

New websites that will buy your used electronics are popping up on the web every day.  The majority of companies are buying iPhones in order to fix them up a bit (if needed), refurbish them, perhaps unlock them, and then turn around and sell them.

You could certainly try and sell your phone on eBay, but you should first check completed auctions to see how much you’d probably get.  And keep in mind, if you’re phone is broken, most people won’t want it on eBay.  These other websites will buy your broken iPhone because certain parts inside are salvageable and would aid in refurbishing a close-to-perfect phone.

So, if you’ve been wondering what to do with that old iPhone, below are some places to check out.  Keep in mind, I’ve only dealt with cashforiphones.com.

iPhone Recycling:

CashforiPhones.com – a simple, easy transaction, and offered more $ than most websites

BuyBackMac.com – I noticed that would have given me another $10 for my phone

There were a few others that I saw online but they only offered $60 to $80.

Have you ever sent or downloaded a zip file?  Then you are already using file compression without even knowing it.  Just about every time you download a file from the internet, it is zipped.  Before you are able to extract the files from the folder to make them usable, you have to unzip the folder.  What is the purpose of file compression?  The main purpose is for files to be transferred  faster and take up less space.  What zipping essentially does is reduce the amount of bits and bytes in the containing folder.

Most computer files have the same information listed over and over and over again. Computer files are fairly redundant in that sense, and what file compression does is simply get rid of all the redundancy in a file. Rather than list the same exact piece of information over and over again, the file compression program lists that information one time only, and then just refers back to it whenever it appears again in the original file. In this way, you can make your original file smaller, send it to someone else, and then have it end up an exact replica of the original file on the other end.

File compression software works off of something like a library. The library contains something like a dictionary. Each piece of information in the file is assigned a specific value, perhaps something like a number, and then rather than repeating the piece of information every time it appears, the program replaces it with the corresponding entry in the library. That way, it simply writes down that short number instead of the whole piece of information, which could be very long.

You could actually recreate the compressed file on your own if you knew what library was used to compress it, much like using a decoder ring when you were a kid to spell out your top secret message. That is what a file compression program does on the other end as it extracts a file and expands it back to its original form – it compares the information in the file against the library and adjusts it accordingly.

But file compression goes even further than this to make your files as small as possible. If it were to only use the library to replace redundant bits of information every time, the file would not be that much smaller than its original size. Instead, file compression software also looks for patterns that get repeated over and over again. If a pattern is found and it is big enough or common enough, then that pattern will be assigned an entry in the library of its own, allowing larger amounts of information to be represented by a single value.

How small your file can compress to depends on the file type, file size and the compression set up. Text files are very easy to compress effectively, but files like mp3s do not contain as many redundancies and therefore cannot be compressed as small. Either way, file compression is a great way to make data transfers more efficient and to economize space on your hard drive.

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To keep your computer running as fast as possible, it is important to perform certain maintenance tasks on it. One these tasks are called defragmenting your hard drive(s) or defrag for short.

What is defragmentation?

Let’s say you have saved a bunch of files to a brand new hard drive (HD) and then over time you remove half of them. Those spaces or blocks you removed the files from are empty but scattered throughout the HD. Now let’s say you save a much larger file to the HD. The system will use the smaller blocks first thus breaking the file into pieces. When you go to open that file, the system needs to reassemble the file and depending on how many blocks the file resides in will depend on how long it will take to open. Defragging your HD will put those pieces in order allowing the system to find them faster and open quicker. Running periodic defrags will keep your system running as fast as possible and although Windows comes with its own utilities including one for defragging, I use a software called Defraggler.

Defraggler

Defraggler can be found here and is developed by Piriform. With Defraggler you can analyze and defrag your HDs as well as certain folders and files. I found it to be very fast and a better utility than the one offered by Windows.

This past week, Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced three new iPods during Apple’s annual music focused event in San Francisco.

Apple went with a completely different look with the iPod Nano which boasts beautiful touch screen, but gave up the ability to play videos, and the Shuffle has gone back to a more classic design with buttons to more easily control the songs you want to play.  But probably the coolest feature of the new line of the iPods is on the new iPod Touch which is now thinner than ever and has a webcam identical to that of the iPhone 4 and allows users to Video Chat using FaceTime.  The only requirement to use FaceTime is that you must be connected to a WiFi network.  I currently have the iPhone 4 and have used FaceTime only a couple times due to the fact that not many of my friends have the iPhone 4 yet.  Hopefully with this new feature, FaceTime will become more of a relevant application and will be used much more often.

But not only did Apple release a new line of iPods, they also introduced iTunes 10 with Ping, a social music service that lets you see what your friends are listening to and you can make recommendations and comment on the music.  In its early stages, it seems as though Apple has some bugs to work out before Ping will really catch on.