I purchased the Dell PowerEdge T20 several years ago for an Unraid server build that I use to back up my data. One of the unfortunate design flaws of this system is the lack of an intake fan for system and specifically hard drive cooling. I had completed this mod around 2016; however, recently I had noticed that my unraid hard drive temperatures were consistently in the 102-110 Farenheight range when they had previously been much lower. I suspected that the intake fan I had installed several years ago had failed and decided to replace it. I also remembered that when I had originally purchased this unit I recall several people online looking for ways to do this exact mod so I decided to take a picture and post instructions on how to do this.
The fan I am using is the Cooler Master Sleeve Bearing 80mm Slim Fan. Installation is fairly straight forward, after removing the front panel, use either adhesive such as 3M double-sided tape or high strength string to tie the fan in place (see below). Either option works- I had originally used double-sided tape but this time opted to use suture material I had handy. After installation my temperatures returned to 92-95 Farenheight.
I was recently putting together a low cost Windows 10 Machine for my dad (post on that to follow) and realized how non-trivial of a task it is to create a bootable windows 10 usb drive using a mac. (If you have a windows machine availiable, simply use the windows 10 installation media creation tool located here) After trying several methods I have put together a quick how-to guide on creating windows 10 installation media (usb) using the latest version of Mac OSX at the moment 10.15. This guide was adapted from this blog.
Format USB Drive
Open your terminal and identify your USB drive using diskutil list.
Once identified, format the drive diskutil eraseDisk MS-DOS "WN10" MBR diskNumberHere where diskNumberHere represents your USB drive.
Copy Files
After downloading the latest Windows 10 ISO open the ISO within finder and identify the volume name using ls /Volumes
The install.wim file located within /sources/install.wim of all recent Windows 10 ISO files is now larger than 4gb therefore a simple copy function to a FAT32 formatted USB drive will not work.
First we will copy over all files except install.wim using:
Next we will use the wimlib tool to segment and copy the files to <3800mb fragments. Wimlib is easily installed using HomeBrew (brew install wimlib) to copy over install.wim. After installing wimlib run the following command:
Microsoft bundles fresh installations of Windows 10 with a variety of junk software including free trials and small games that most people have no intention of using. Uninstalling this mess of software even on a /fresh/ installation can be challenging. Luckily, there are some tools that can help. Below are the steps to easily uninstall this software in the fewest steps possible.
Download the Windows 10 decrapifierscript and save it to your desktop as decrapify.ps1
Open powershell in administrator mode and run Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
Now run the powershell script & "C:\Users\user\Desktop\decrapify.ps1”
Once the script finishes running all of the unnecessary software should have been removed. Set your execution policy back to restricted to prevent unauthorized powershell scripts from running. Set-ExecutionPolicy restricted
