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I am pumped to see that Alter Bridge will be releasing their new album, titled Blackbird, on October 9. To whet their fans’ appetites, they have released their first single from the album, Rise Today.
BTW, the posts will probably slow down since I’m back in school. I’d talk more, but schoolwork awaits.
I’m in the process of rebuilding one of my parents’ computers that had the motherboard die a little over three months ago. We decided to get a new motherboard, CPU, and memory, as opposed to buying a new, low-end computer. Getting a replacement motherboard was out of the question since this was a five year old computer (AMD Athlon XP 2000+, 266 MHz DDR SDRAM) because it is simply impossible to find a motherboard that supports all of our old components.
I ended up getting a BIOSTAR K8M800 Micro AM2 motherboard and an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ (1.9 GHz, Brisbane core) along with a gig of 667 MHz DDR2 memory. I chose the motherboard because it has a x8 AGP slot, an IDE slot, and two IDE channels, which would handle all of our old components. I got the processor simply because it was the cheapest dual core processor that I could find.
The parts came in the main on Wednesday and I rushed to put the computer together so that I could get it rebuilt before I leave for school on Saturday. It’s been a very long time since I’ve built a computer and obviously things have changed a bit. I was caught off guard by the pre-applied thermal paste on the heat sink. So was the carpet in my living room. The parents weren’t too happy about that. I completed the otherwise uneventful build and took the computer back downstairs to test it out.
Upon the first boot, the old Windows install tried to boot, but immediately blue-screened. I decided that the computer was probably overdue for a Windows reinstall, so I put in the Windows XP Home CD and rebooted the computer. I immediately noticed weird graphical glitches in the text that was displayed on the screen. I thought that it might be something to do with the graphics card that I was using (possibly died along with the old motherboard), so I plugged the monitor into the on-board video, but did not get a signal. I then removed the video card (maybe the BIOS automatically disables the on-board video when an AGP video card is inserted) and booted the computer again. Well, I tried to boot it anyway. The computer refused to boot until I put the video card back in.
Then I thought about the fact that I was working with a 300W power supply and trying to run a GeForce 4, SoundBlaster Audigy, two hard drives, two optical drives, a case fan, a CPU, and a motherboard. The load seemed to be a little high to me, so I tried out many power requirement calculators around the web and got estimates between about 250W and 350W. I decided to throw in a 450W PS that my dad had in the closet and see if it fixed things. It didn’t change a thing. I decided to call it quits for the night before I went Office Space on it out of frustration.
This morning, my dad talked with the former IT guy at his place of employment to get his feedback on what might be going on. He ended up being right on: the motherboard did not support Athlon 64 X2 processors. I ends up that just being a Socket AM2 motherboard does not mean that it supports all Socket AM2 processors. In this case, the motherboard only supported AMD Sempron 64 processors. So, I’ll be RMA-ing the X2 and getting a Sempron 64 3600+ (2.0 GHz, Manila core) to replace it since it is the cheaper option (versus getting a supporting motherboard and an IDE add-in card). So much for building it before I leave for school.
Computers seem to have turned against me this past month. First, my laptop stopped keeping time correctly. Started acting up after a night on which I left it to defrag and virus scan. Wasn’t too bad at first, only losing a few minutes a day. It got progressively worse, getting to the point where it would lose around 15 seconds every minute! A little digging revealed that the computer’s BIOS was still keeping time correctly. This was made evident by the fact that the computer never lost time while it was turned off.
A little research online revealed that Windows actually keeps track of time by itself during idle cycles. Since it is a low-priority task, it can be skipped some times when your CPU is under high load, leading to the clock losing time. This description seemed to match my symptoms somewhat (I didn’t seem to have a pegged CPU). Since my computer had been acting up anyway, I went ahead and reformatted and reinstalled XP. Unfortunately, after loading up my normal compliment of programs (virtually the same set that I have been running for years), I noticed that my computer was losing time at the same clip that it was before. Needless to say, I am pretty peeved, especially since my lappy just went out of warranty in mid-June. Next week, I plan to put in my spare hard drive (it’s dying, slowly but surely) with an empty XP install to see if it is also affected. My money says that it will be.
Second issue: my external hard drive, which holds my backups, just started acting up a few days ago. It was accessed every few seconds, and trying to view the contents of at least one folder caused Windows Explorer to hang and the hard drive to have constant access. The only way to stop this without killing explorer.exe was to unplug the drive and then plug it in again. I decided to run SpinRite on the drive since it seems to fix those weird drive issues. Twenty eight hours later, the drive had finished being scanned, so I placed it back in its enclosure and hooked it back up to my lappy. Unfortunately, same results as before. I unhooked the drive to un-hang explorer and then plugged it back in again. For some reason, it didn’t show up. I unplugged it again and plugged it back in. Still, no drive showed up. I popped into the drive management panel to see that the drive itself was recognized, however, Windows claimed that it was unpartitioned. It sure as heck wasn’t a few minutes prior! I decided to call it quits since it was one in the morning at that point.
This afternoon, I got the demo version of Active@ Undelete and ran it on the drive to see what it could find. Disappointingly, it found nothing. I decided to see if it could be read if placed in another computer (testing to see if the enclosure is bad). First computer that I tested it in was a P2-400MHz running XP Pro SP2. Adding it to the computer prevented it from booting. My guess is that the computer’s BIOS is unable to handle 200GB drives. I tried it next in my parent’s new Core 2 Duo E4300 machine running Vista Home Premium. Everything booted fine this time, but it also showed that the drive had no partitions.
Dejected, I placed the drive back in the enclosure and hooked it back up to my laptop. When I went to start running Active@ Undelete on the drive in the Low Level mode (apx 72 hours to complete), I clicked the start button, only to have it report that it had completed a few seconds later. I checked the drive and noticed that it was listed as having a paltry 512 kB capacity. I began worrying that the electronics on the drive had died. I tried unplugging the drive and giving the computer a minute to "readjust" before plugging the drive back in. This time, the drive showed up reporting the correct capacity. When I started running Active@ Undelete on the drive again, it immediately reported that it had found a deleted partition. Joy! I’ll let it run overnight to make sure that everything is found. If it is so, then I’ll fork over $40 so that I can get the version that can recover files over 64 kB in size. (Stupid demo limitations.)
Last issue: project computer. I’m fixing up a computer for my church to be a label printer for CDs. This would be the same P2-400MHz that I used to test my hard drive. Anyway, being the pragmatic techie that I am, the first step that I take in refurbing a computer is reinstalling Windows. I used the Magical Jelly Bean to retrieve the Windows CD key from the install since I did not have the original install media. I wrote it down, then started reinstalling from my custom XP Pro install disc, complete with SP2 slipstreamed in. I got to the CD key screen and typed it in. Invalid key. WTF! I tried it about twenty times, but still got the same error. I decided that I wanted to get the computer up and running, so I typed in my personal CD key, meaning to replace it in the future after I got the original CD key from the previous owner. I finished the install and booted the computer. (XP is surprisingly snappy on this computer.) I went to activate and got a message telling me that I’ve activated this key too many times. WTF! I don’t recall there being a limited number of times that you can activate XP. I decided to give up on the project until I get a good key since you can’t even install updates without having activated.
One last rant for the night. Why does SMC make a USB wi-fi adapter that does not work with XP’s wireless networking app? It forces you to use it’s own app to connect, which is just stupid. Our US Robotics USB wi-fi adapter works just fine, so why not SMC.
I’m not much of a fan of link dumps, but I’ve been bad and let stuff pile up that I wanted to blog on, so here goes:
We all know that you really can’t really experience the internet without broadband. Up until last Wednesday, my parents still used dial-up (only 30 hours a month on the same phone line as the one that we used for the phone). They finally decided to take the plunge and get cable internet. Unfortunately, our local cable provider, Time Warner, only offers broadband over cable if you sign up for digital cable service, which is about three tiers higher than my parents had. (This might be the first time that I would have preferred Comcast, who do not tie their cable broadband service to any tier of their cable television service.) As a bonus, they went ahead and signed up for digital voice service also.
They were scheduled to have the installation on last Wednesday. The installation guy showed up a day early for the installation, only to discover that he did not have the correct modem for our installation. He said that he would come back on Thursday to do the actual installation. I talked to my mom later that night (on the phone) and had the call get dropped. (Darn you Sprint!) When I went to call her back, I got a lovely "The number that you have dialed is not in service" message. Puzzled, I waited for my mom to call me back, which she did. After trying to call her from my grandma’s land line and my aunt’s cell (Verizon) with no luck, my mom called up Time Warner to find out what was wrong. It ends up that somehow our phone service had been turned off prematurely. How this still allowed calls to be placed still puzzles me.
The installation guy ended up showing up on Wednesday afternoon and completed the installation, including setting up our router (a lovely Linksys WRT54G) to provide a wireless signal to the rest of the house and giving us a USB wireless adapter. I took care of setting up the router (ie, changing the default password and SSID) and turning on wireless security (WPA-TKIP). (The installer couldn’t turn on the security for liability reasons.)
At the end of the day, this makes being home much easier since I am not forced to steal broadband from neighbors who leave their wireless access points unsecured.