The Wackiest Technology Tales of 2008

coondoggie writes "Despite the daily drumbeat of new and improved hardware or software, the tech industry isn't all bits and bytes. Some interesting things happen along the way too. Like floating data centers, space geekonauts, shape shifting robots and weird bedfellows (like Microsoft and Jerry Seinfeld). What we include here is an example of what we thought were the best, slightly off-center stories of 2008."

Comments

Hai

[rickyrocks]

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My last disaster

[Whiteox]

Since the site is humdrum I'll tell you my wacky tale.

I bought 2x1 GB sticks of ram for an XP box I'm currently using. This was a replacement for 2x512MB sticks.
Booted fine up to a point, then seemed to hang just before the logon screen.
Kernel dump crash and I rebooted. About 5 mins later the desktop loaded and nothing would work to well.
I grabbed a linux disk and did a memtest and stick#2 failed miserably on test#6.
So I replaced it (after testing it) and it booted fine.
Unfortunately I had missing icons, shortcuts pointing to the wrong exe, directx errors and I lost the ability to cut/paste into Thunderbird and OO.org3. Other minor annoyances.
I rebuilt the desktop and got a few icons back but still haven't resolved the other issues. A chkdsk showed minor HD damage - all fixed.
Reinstalled some apps - Driectx, Nero etc, tried to update with Sp3 again which crashed.
So what I worked out was that the bad ram was read by the kernel at some time during/after boot and 'wrote' corrupted info onto the drive and consequently stuffed up my XP. All my files are intact and it looks like a complete reinstall before xmas. Unless I can work out how to rebuild the registry.
It's crazy that one bit of bad ram can cause such problems.