although they might be able to spell "it costs more than dvd"
Also I bet a few of them are confused at the fact that they could now own "Back To The Future" on betamax, vhs, laserdisc, videocd, dvd, and/or blu-ray. speaking of which, bttf has already been released on several failed formats, how the heck did it miss out being released on hd-dvd?
4TB = 4096GB = 4,194,304MB however, in the 'hard drive' world, and everywhere else these days, we've been told that 1000MB=1GB and 1000GB=1TB, so 4TB = 4,000GB = 4,000,000MB.
So what are we really getting?! if 1TB = 1,048,576MB, then 4TB = 4,194,304MB, so we are missing 194,304MB - which is the better part of 190GB right?
Isn't the mixing of the 'new' SI units and good old binary values confusing? now someone needs to do the calculation for certain filesystems and not just arbitrary values.
feel free to correct me if I am wrong, I wrote this before going to sleep.
As someone who currently has a 55 day uptime on his main XP box, I shall add a few others to the list
3. If explorer.exe doesn't crash and not unallocate it's memory (which I suppose could be taken care of by a third party shell, but most of them will end up pulling explorer up for something anyway , and a decent amount of them are unstable when run for a very long time, a way around most explorer crashes has been for me to check the little known box that will load another explorer process for every window that is needed so that when one crashes it 'possibly' won't take the rest of them out)
4. If general memory leaks don't take a substantial amount of your physical ram. (All I can say is I've personally had the most trouble with.net framework or vb based programs thieving memory and not returning it). (yay for firefox actually giving up the gobs of ram it takes once you close it after a week)
5. If you don't pick up any viruses on the way (and your virus protection 1. requires no reboots during updates and 2. is programmed decently well)
although a few things will plague any OS's stability, for an example,
If your UPS/battery doesn't run out of juice during a given outage. (however I suppose you could circumvent this with proper usb drivers and hibernation, but there could be a technicality as then it might not count as continuous uptime)
or
If a piece of critical hardware fails
Any OS can be stable (well, I take that back, except ME) just as long as you monitor it like crazy and keep everything up..
Although I will admit that I am spoiled by my smoothwall and it's 280 something day uptime (the silly UPS's battery died less than a year ago leaving it unpowered in an outage), although even that's nothing compared to the old fridge VAX we had at the place I worked, which had a non-rebooting uptime of 5 1/2 years, good old VMS.
quote:"That report was a hatchet job. Bad ram is very rare"
Back in the day it really was not a common problem, and the cases of it I remember were easy to diagnose because the comp would not even post. My personal first diagnoses I made of bad ram (that posts fine and 'looks' fine) back in '95 or so really had me pulling my hair out. I eventually tore the whole computer apart, set it up on a bench, and tested each part individually to figure it out, when I found it was the ram I was shocked. (it also didn't help having a 28.8kb dial up connection to the web, no affordable cd burner even on the horizon, and a lack of good low kb free tools)
Anyway, I beg to differ that bad ram is rare, I've had loads of bad ram since they released sticks with 512MB and over. It's been so bad for me, I don't let a rig go to someone 'till it passes 2 times with memtest. I've bought 3 laptops for me and my family in the last year from retail stores, and 2 came to me with at least 1 bad ddr2 module, and I see it very often on customer computers. Ususally I am the last resort before it gets the dumpster or sent back, when it ends up being a simple ram issue.
now you might say, wait a min, that's if you only use crappy ram, but I've gotten bad ram from everybody from corsair, kingston, crucial, PQI, patriot, micron oem, and a slew of others using any kind of chip, as well as straight from a big computer factory, where they are supposed to test it before it leaves. I've seen it in servers, workstations, desktops, notebooks, you name it, I probably have a bad stick of it somewhere in my room. Most everyone I've dealt with has great return programs which took care of me very well, but it's still a fact that I shouldn't have gotten the bad ram in the first place-
I have a feeling that if the test was 'more fair' as you call it and had something...easier(?) to diagnose, perhaps a bad power supply (the most often failure I see over here in Arizona), or perhaps dust clogged cpu fan, then most of the so called techs they hired still wouldn't have figured it out.
my only gripe is that crying over getting charged $35 for a $25 part is a bit extreme, I mean come on, a $10 markup ain't too bad considering that you didn't count shipping in "what you got it on the net" for.
on the case of the floppy backwards, the cable was not keyed and the light was indeed on.
the ram was not a pretty sight though, I've seen DDR and even SDRAM wedged in backwards, plastic bridges broken, pins bent in the socket, and nice burn marks on the gold fingers on the ram.
I've had to personally clean up messes that were made by a company that rhymes with "Geek Squad" and quite a few others as well, and can tell you that they push everything that makes them money and that a fair amount of them don't know what the hell they are doing (my buddy who worked there got fired for not selling enough product and not charging a few people for really simple problems). I have seen them and others totally miss easy problems on systems (a cpu cooling fan that is so caked up with so much dust that it doesn't spin), screw up perfectly functioning systems (install a floppy cable backwards, install ram backwards(!), forget to connect little things back up like the hard drive's data cable), and setup networks so badly it's a wonder they even work (Then again the ones I visit are because they don't work and I think it's terrible that they already gave up an arm, leg, and first born to a company which screwed everything up). The specific BSOD's that the bait system should have been putting up (if it is like the one they showed in a little blip in one of the segments) should have been a dead giveaway to anybody with the power of google that the ram, or at the very least some piece of hardware was at fault (not sure how that one fellow suggested the video card, or that other dude the cpu!), although I will say that I would have been a little confused had the customer said it 'just happened' that day, as ram is usually bad from the factory, I would have probably gone into questioning about if the comp had done anything like that previously before I run a memtest)
I personally always find out if a system is under warranty before even breathing upon any hardware inside the machine, never charge anything if I don't or cannot fix it (which although rare does happen ), and I always charge simple cheap fees for things like spyware and viruses, (ei $15-$20) on easily removed stuff (like an hour or so actually spent on it onsite), and involve the customer in any purchasing of parts directly if I can.
My motivation as a tech has always been to teach customers that there is no "magic box", that it is decently easy to maintain, they are not going to break it by looking at it, the internals are nothing to be afraid of (no they won't get shocked adding ram), they can live a happy online computer life by staying away from bad sites, not using IE or Outlook in most cases is the best, updating AV and spyware defs is a good thing running windows, using something called "google" to find answers to questions can prevent hair loss, and I also go the extra step and teach them methods of searching forums for answers to any given computer problem(also how NOT to use the caps lock key if they do post).
so I generally tell them anything they want to learn. Companies, and freelancers who are thieves, or don't know how to fix things give our trade a terrible name, and as long as there is money to be made, they will be with us making everyones lifes slightly worse off. Computer repair is tedious, and you have to really love or enjoy it to make your customers happy. I know nothing feels better to me than rescuing someone's vacation pictures from a hard drive that is on it's last legs with the dreaded "click of death" in fornt of their eyes, take em to the store to get another hdd, load everything back and be done and have them running in less than an hour and less than $100.)
I should probably say more about the actual video now, because I derailed my train and went into a rant.
Nothing on that tape surprised me sadly, there have always been bad techs around, and there have always been good techs who are told to 'add' something to the bottom line by their bosses at risk of loosing their jobs. I never have thought that the so called "formal training" or certs give you the ability to troubleshoot any given machine. If someone is gonna slack off and not pay attention, they will, and retain enough of it that they can pass a multiple choice test. I guess I didn't get my rant completed.. oh well, take it easy everyone.
Thanks AMD, and to all of the devs, communities, and testers out there who are going to put their heart, soul, time and money into making a rock solid driver set! Make sure that these specs and the others that we all hope will be released are put to the best use possible.
I look forward to any OS drivers that are produced and will at the very least try to put my time to use by finding and reporting bugs with the hardware I have when the time comes.
I bought 3 laptops for my family, two of them were Turion X2's one by acer, one by gateway, and a basic dual core pentium m system by everex. Anyway, the gateway had vista home premium, and the others had home basic. I upgraded the home premium system from 1GB ram to 2.5GB, and got the home basic systems up to a respectable 1.5GB of ram each.
Anyway, after hours of tweaking my gateway I still could not get the damn thing under 210MB Idle at startup with no startup programs running and all useless services turned off (and with XPSP2 I generally like it to be somewhere around 77MB usage max on a clean restart on mem usage considering no other programs are launched ar startup), and the interface, even though it resembled windows 2000 after I was done with it, was still very slow and unresponsive. The networking was a nightmare and didn't work 1/2 of the time, and NONE OF THE SYSTEMS WOULD SLEEP RIGHT! heck, 2 of the systems wouldn't even hibernate for me, and this is a preloaded system. Tech support at gateway, acer, and everex all assured me that it was a driver problem and that all of it was resolved in new drivers....which they hadn't been.... I got excuses stemming from microsoft, themselves, their vendors, driver writers, you name it, excuses, but no solutions. So I went through updating driver and patch hell, sometimes installing modified xp drivers in attempt to get things working, got called a liar and many other nasty things on some unofficial vista support forums after suggesting I was displeased with the performance and suggesting that this cannot be just the driver's fault alone,
after about 3 hours of dicking around with things so far buried into the operating system I was beginning to think that it was like trying to get Xfree86 running in Red Hat 5 with a ATI radeon back in the day, and several system recovery's later after I screwed up the OS so badly it wouldn't boot anymore, so I threw in the towel and loaded XP on the two laptops that were going to my family members, and left vista on mine. I finally got it running almost decently, and ran it for two weeks and noticed that it tended to slow down at random times. I found vista required the most work out of the box to make it even slightly functional- I mean on other OS's, I don't have to surgically remove useless services, ei the windows "nanny", or interfaces which chew up ram to make something look pretty, or find odd versions of drivers which are broken in one regard, but possibly not another, drivers that weren't even made for the device I am using, but perhaps another made by a different vendor with the same chipset. Also it doesn't help that there are stumbling blocks built right into it because they assume that the user is completely useless, or the fact that they re-arranged all the important control panels, and replaced quite a few of them with useless counterparts. I finally gave up on my laptop and loaded XP onto it. For those who are curious, I did go through a few headaches tracking down drivers for everything in XP, but i found that more often than not the XP drivers were bundled with the vista drivers, or at least the vista drivers somehow worked under XP. I have already loaded XP on 11 of my customer's laptops which came with one form of vista or another, and I have already run out of my little stockpile of XP Pro OEM liscenses I bought a years back... Perhaps I should snag a few more before they disappear.
An old crusty AMI engineer explained it to me this way-
"Keyboard error/No keyboard present Press F1 to continue, DEL to enter SETUP" actually comes from a much different time than now, back to when users were a little bit more tech savey and ROM chips were not very spacious. It often took no less than 4 rom chips to contain a 8088, 8086, or 80286 bios (and even another rom chip just for the purpose of decoding the keyboard's input), so it was a moot point to use up more space by adding in another clause for a separate error statement just for the keyboard, so there was an implied "(Hook up your damn keyboard)" after "Keyboard error/No keyboard present" then "Press F1 to continue, DEL to enter SETUP" just as there is an implied "(Fix your darn time and date and cmos settings)" after "CMOS CHECKSUM INVALID", "Press F1 to continue, DEL to enter SETUP"
As for the worst tech "feature" I've ever used.... It's got to be the blue screen of death that came up, beginning with windows 95(?), when it couldn't read media (didn't matter if it was floppy, hard drive, cdrom, or network drive). Of the customers I had who were used to the dreadful white box with 2 options and a system read error none of them were too amused to see a BSOD instead - they would then assume that their computer crashed (not even reading the screen) and restarted it from there. Also my experience with it has been more often than not, that particular BSOD had a tendency to lock the system up.... I would like to know who thought a BSOD was a good way to handle a media read error.
I personally like my room looking like a cockpit thank you very much - switches to turn off or cycle LED's routinely fail, leaving me without critical information (damn you Cisco!), like "oh no the lights on my network switch are blinking more out of control than normal, I better check my firewall logs to see who's trying to get in here" (and they come from anywhere, Texas, Malaysia, Canada, D.C., China, Russia, England, Germany, you name it, everyone seems to want to know my taxes and get my badly composed "music")
If a light should ever bug me that I can't unplug it (or are just too lazy to), for an instance the Check Engine Light in my car, or the "RPS Level Low" light over at the nuke plant I can utilize a little known technology called electrical tape(tm) to turn that evil light off for good.
when 98 came out I was making it run on 486/33's with 8mb of ram and a 255mb hdd for an ESL class because that's all I could get donated- since most were the same, it was a process of making a "super" machine (which I put a dx4/133 in and 64mb of ram) installing on that one, then copying it's hard drive to the others. I even put netscape communicator and office on those machines, got them on a network and the internet, and setup a network printer for them. It was alot of work, the computers were slow, but still usable. (only real big headache was the damn ISA network cards had to be individually setup, and since only one of the machines had a cdrom drive, there was alot of copying individual driver files by floppy from one computer to another...
I remember when 8mb was hot stuff (1994), and when 1mb was hot stuff (1990)
in 96 32 was standard, and I remember dragging a old beat up original bugged pentium 75, a socket 4 pentium 60, and a 486dx/100(amd) into the world of 32MB, I tell you, it was screaming fast! (for like a week)
now 2gb is becoming standard!
yep, I ran one with my 20" apple for years, love that little piece of hardware-
some older apple monitors (Multiscan 15's and such) actually had db15's on them and came with an adaptor to make it work on a mac (?) we had a full lab of LC's with apple branded monitors that were db15 native and came with the inverse of that adaptor =)
Man, my hp48g (not even the gx) has saved me multiple times, I LOVE it, and I wouldn't use anything else-
whenever I am forced to use another calculator, I always accidently enter it in rpn,
I love the system so much I wish hp never stopped making them, and I had to track down a hp 32sII so I could do exams which forbid graphing calculators-
the only bad thing is that sometimes professors I had back in college knew what I had and forbid me from using my 48g on anything-
but anyway go old school hp and you can't go wrong, they are made for use, their quality is unparalleled, and you will enjoy using it and figuring out all it's time saving features-
if nothing else you will gain a better understanding of principles behind math by simply using it.
Just curious, has anyone here messed with hp's 'newer' graphing calculators like the hp50g? is it of the same quality as their older masterpieces?
I was thinking that too-
I wonder if his temps would decrease or increase without the ionizer in the way-
speaking of which he still has not yet put any solid temps up there to at least make us believe that it functions.
"The main reason we chose the Intel CPU is if for some reason there was a thermal issue it will self-protect the CPU unlike AMD's"
Has he been living in a cave?, it hasn't been that way since the release of the Kt333 and Nforce chipsets for socketA, and never has had any issue on socket 754 and over
Also he does mention the core 2 duo, but I am still surprised that he didn't build it around one in the first place, or at least something which puts out less heat than a pentium D at 3.2ghz..... and certainly he didn't think about building it around a mobile cpu like the older pentium M's or core duo's, turion or mobile sempron, or even a low energy X2....
and another little gripe---
the CFM's he is reporting seem wayyyy out of proportion, I don't think he knows how to differentiate a CFM from his ass....
I mean, look, the very expensive ones I see barely have enough flow to make a 5" long ribbon attached to it float...
No it would totally suck for audio production-
could you imagine the transients caused by the high frequency HV system in that ionic air cleaner?
It should play hell with the circuit and make groundings unclean-
plus with a audio production pc, the pc and other equipment that makes noise (not including the one's and their equipment which is actually making noise to be recorded) is isolated from the actual interior of the recording studio in the first place...
but I can just see high freq wines and switching being forced back through amplifiers and pickup equipment-
correct me if I am wrong here
I enjoy smoothwall as well, I have around 27 pc's behind it (a mixture of windoze, linux, and a few odd ones), a couple macs, some ancient hardware, and some MISC things....
I already built a replacement box for my poor old decrepit one and installed IPCOP on it, and so far, I've found that nearly every IPCOP forum has been hacked and not put back online and there are far fewer maintained mods for it than I was told.. I will probably overwrite it with smoothwall since it has been working for my uses for 2 years or so.
great program, the fellows who worked to make it what it is today deserve a gold star!
[Scotty Voice]Captain, Their Server Blew Up, She Couldn't Take The Pow'r[/Scotty Voice]
Although it is defiantly interesting, and for what it's worth (and the very few seconds i saw of it) I like it =)
Slashdot Mirror
although they might be able to spell "it costs more than dvd"
Also I bet a few of them are confused at the fact that they could now own "Back To The Future" on betamax, vhs, laserdisc, videocd, dvd, and/or blu-ray. speaking of which, bttf has already been released on several failed formats, how the heck did it miss out being released on hd-dvd?
and I am gonna get a FOXCONN mobo?!?!
man I guess I seriously have to revise my standards =)
4TB = 4096GB = 4,194,304MB
however,
in the 'hard drive' world, and everywhere else these days, we've been told that 1000MB=1GB and 1000GB=1TB, so 4TB = 4,000GB = 4,000,000MB.
So what are we really getting?! if 1TB = 1,048,576MB, then 4TB = 4,194,304MB, so we are missing 194,304MB - which is the better part of 190GB right?
Isn't the mixing of the 'new' SI units and good old binary values confusing? now someone needs to do the calculation for certain filesystems and not just arbitrary values.
feel free to correct me if I am wrong, I wrote this before going to sleep.
As someone who currently has a 55 day uptime on his main XP box, I shall add a few others to the list
.net framework or vb based programs thieving memory and not returning it). (yay for firefox actually giving up the gobs of ram it takes once you close it after a week)
3. If explorer.exe doesn't crash and not unallocate it's memory (which I suppose could be taken care of by a third party shell, but most of them will end up pulling explorer up for something anyway , and a decent amount of them are unstable when run for a very long time, a way around most explorer crashes has been for me to check the little known box that will load another explorer process for every window that is needed so that when one crashes it 'possibly' won't take the rest of them out)
4. If general memory leaks don't take a substantial amount of your physical ram. (All I can say is I've personally had the most trouble with
5. If you don't pick up any viruses on the way (and your virus protection 1. requires no reboots during updates and 2. is programmed decently well)
although a few things will plague any OS's stability,
for an example,
If your UPS/battery doesn't run out of juice during a given outage. (however I suppose you could circumvent this with proper usb drivers and hibernation, but there could be a technicality as then it might not count as continuous uptime)
or
If a piece of critical hardware fails
Any OS can be stable (well, I take that back, except ME) just as long as you monitor it like crazy and keep everything up..
Although I will admit that I am spoiled by my smoothwall and it's 280 something day uptime (the silly UPS's battery died less than a year ago leaving it unpowered in an outage), although even that's nothing compared to the old fridge VAX we had at the place I worked, which had a non-rebooting uptime of 5 1/2 years, good old VMS.
quote:"That report was a hatchet job. Bad ram is very rare"
Back in the day it really was not a common problem, and the cases of it I remember were easy to diagnose because the comp would not even post. My personal first diagnoses I made of bad ram (that posts fine and 'looks' fine) back in '95 or so really had me pulling my hair out. I eventually tore the whole computer apart, set it up on a bench, and tested each part individually to figure it out, when I found it was the ram I was shocked. (it also didn't help having a 28.8kb dial up connection to the web, no affordable cd burner even on the horizon, and a lack of good low kb free tools)
Anyway, I beg to differ that bad ram is rare, I've had loads of bad ram since they released sticks with 512MB and over.
It's been so bad for me, I don't let a rig go to someone 'till it passes 2 times with memtest.
I've bought 3 laptops for me and my family in the last year from retail stores, and 2 came to me with at least 1 bad ddr2 module, and I see it very often on customer computers. Ususally I am the last resort before it gets the dumpster or sent back, when it ends up being a simple ram issue.
now you might say, wait a min, that's if you only use crappy ram, but I've gotten bad ram from everybody from corsair, kingston, crucial, PQI, patriot, micron oem, and a slew of others using any kind of chip, as well as straight from a big computer factory, where they are supposed to test it before it leaves. I've seen it in servers, workstations, desktops, notebooks, you name it, I probably have a bad stick of it somewhere in my room. Most everyone I've dealt with has great return programs which took care of me very well, but it's still a fact that I shouldn't have gotten the bad ram in the first place-
I have a feeling that if the test was 'more fair' as you call it and had something...easier(?) to diagnose, perhaps a bad power supply (the most often failure I see over here in Arizona), or perhaps dust clogged cpu fan, then most of the so called techs they hired still wouldn't have figured it out.
my only gripe is that crying over getting charged $35 for a $25 part is a bit extreme, I mean come on, a $10 markup ain't too bad considering that you didn't count shipping in "what you got it on the net" for.
yep indeed-
on the case of the floppy backwards, the cable was not keyed and the light was indeed on.
the ram was not a pretty sight though, I've seen DDR and even SDRAM wedged in backwards, plastic bridges broken, pins bent in the socket, and nice burn marks on the gold fingers on the ram.
A big well said to the parent thread.
I've had to personally clean up messes that were made by a company that rhymes with "Geek Squad" and quite a few others as well, and can tell you that they push everything that makes them money and that a fair amount of them don't know what the hell they are doing (my buddy who worked there got fired for not selling enough product and not charging a few people for really simple problems). I have seen them and others totally miss easy problems on systems (a cpu cooling fan that is so caked up with so much dust that it doesn't spin), screw up perfectly functioning systems (install a floppy cable backwards, install ram backwards(!), forget to connect little things back up like the hard drive's data cable), and setup networks so badly it's a wonder they even work (Then again the ones I visit are because they don't work and I think it's terrible that they already gave up an arm, leg, and first born to a company which screwed everything up). The specific BSOD's that the bait system should have been putting up (if it is like the one they showed in a little blip in one of the segments) should have been a dead giveaway to anybody with the power of google that the ram, or at the very least some piece of hardware was at fault (not sure how that one fellow suggested the video card, or that other dude the cpu!), although I will say that I would have been a little confused had the customer said it 'just happened' that day, as ram is usually bad from the factory, I would have probably gone into questioning about if the comp had done anything like that previously before I run a memtest)
I personally always find out if a system is under warranty before even breathing upon any hardware inside the machine, never charge anything if I don't or cannot fix it (which although rare does happen ), and I always charge simple cheap fees for things like spyware and viruses, (ei $15-$20) on easily removed stuff (like an hour or so actually spent on it onsite), and involve the customer in any purchasing of parts directly if I can.
My motivation as a tech has always been to teach customers that there is no "magic box", that it is decently easy to maintain, they are not going to break it by looking at it, the internals are nothing to be afraid of (no they won't get shocked adding ram), they can live a happy online computer life by staying away from bad sites, not using IE or Outlook in most cases is the best, updating AV and spyware defs is a good thing running windows, using something called "google" to find answers to questions can prevent hair loss, and I also go the extra step and teach them methods of searching forums for answers to any given computer problem(also how NOT to use the caps lock key if they do post).
so I generally tell them anything they want to learn. Companies, and freelancers who are thieves, or don't know how to fix things give our trade a terrible name, and as long as there is money to be made, they will be with us making everyones lifes slightly worse off. Computer repair is tedious, and you have to really love or enjoy it to make your customers happy. I know nothing feels better to me than rescuing someone's vacation pictures from a hard drive that is on it's last legs with the dreaded "click of death" in fornt of their eyes, take em to the store to get another hdd, load everything back and be done and have them running in less than an hour and less than $100.)
I should probably say more about the actual video now, because I derailed my train and went into a rant.
Nothing on that tape surprised me sadly, there have always been bad techs around, and there have always been good techs who are told to 'add' something to the bottom line by their bosses at risk of loosing their jobs. I never have thought that the so called "formal training" or certs give you the ability to troubleshoot any given machine. If someone is gonna slack off and not pay attention, they will, and retain enough of it that they can pass a multiple choice test. I guess I didn't get my rant completed.. oh well, take it easy everyone.
Thanks AMD, and to all of the devs, communities, and testers out there who are going to put their heart, soul, time and money into making a rock solid driver set! Make sure that these specs and the others that we all hope will be released are put to the best use possible.
I look forward to any OS drivers that are produced and will at the very least try to put my time to use by finding and reporting bugs with the hardware I have when the time comes.
^ I upgraded the everex system to 2gb, sorry for the confusion
I bought 3 laptops for my family, two of them were Turion X2's one by acer, one by gateway, and a basic dual core pentium m system by everex. Anyway, the gateway had vista home premium, and the others had home basic. I upgraded the home premium system from 1GB ram to 2.5GB, and got the home basic systems up to a respectable 1.5GB of ram each.
Anyway, after hours of tweaking my gateway I still could not get the damn thing under 210MB Idle at startup with no startup programs running and all useless services turned off (and with XPSP2 I generally like it to be somewhere around 77MB usage max on a clean restart on mem usage considering no other programs are launched ar startup), and the interface, even though it resembled windows 2000 after I was done with it, was still very slow and unresponsive. The networking was a nightmare and didn't work 1/2 of the time, and NONE OF THE SYSTEMS WOULD SLEEP RIGHT! heck, 2 of the systems wouldn't even hibernate for me, and this is a preloaded system. Tech support at gateway, acer, and everex all assured me that it was a driver problem and that all of it was resolved in new drivers....which they hadn't been.... I got excuses stemming from microsoft, themselves, their vendors, driver writers, you name it, excuses, but no solutions.
So I went through updating driver and patch hell, sometimes installing modified xp drivers in attempt to get things working, got called a liar and many other nasty things on some unofficial vista support forums after suggesting I was displeased with the performance and suggesting that this cannot be just the driver's fault alone,
after about 3 hours of dicking around with things so far buried into the operating system I was beginning to think that it was like trying to get Xfree86 running in Red Hat 5 with a ATI radeon back in the day, and several system recovery's later after I screwed up the OS so badly it wouldn't boot anymore, so I threw in the towel and loaded XP on the two laptops that were going to my family members, and left vista on mine. I finally got it running almost decently, and ran it for two weeks and noticed that it tended to slow down at random times.
I found vista required the most work out of the box to make it even slightly functional-
I mean on other OS's, I don't have to surgically remove useless services, ei the windows "nanny", or interfaces which chew up ram to make something look pretty, or find odd versions of drivers which are broken in one regard, but possibly not another, drivers that weren't even made for the device I am using, but perhaps another made by a different vendor with the same chipset. Also it doesn't help that there are stumbling blocks built right into it because they assume that the user is completely useless, or the fact that they re-arranged all the important control panels, and replaced quite a few of them with useless counterparts. I finally gave up on my laptop and loaded XP onto it.
For those who are curious, I did go through a few headaches tracking down drivers for everything in XP, but i found that more often than not the XP drivers were bundled with the vista drivers, or at least the vista drivers somehow worked under XP. I have already loaded XP on 11 of my customer's laptops which came with one form of vista or another, and I have already run out of my little stockpile of XP Pro OEM liscenses I bought a years back... Perhaps I should snag a few more before they disappear.
also it wouldn't be a pentium pro, it would be an original celeron 300 (without the cache)
An old crusty AMI engineer explained it to me this way-
"Keyboard error/No keyboard present
Press F1 to continue, DEL to enter SETUP"
actually comes from a much different time than now, back to when users were a little bit more tech savey and ROM chips were not very spacious. It often took no less than 4 rom chips to contain a 8088, 8086, or 80286 bios (and even another rom chip just for the purpose of decoding the keyboard's input), so it was a moot point to use up more space by adding in another clause for a separate error statement just for the keyboard, so there was an implied
"(Hook up your damn keyboard)" after "Keyboard error/No keyboard present"
then "Press F1 to continue, DEL to enter SETUP" just as there is an implied
"(Fix your darn time and date and cmos settings)" after "CMOS CHECKSUM INVALID", "Press F1 to continue, DEL to enter SETUP"
As for the worst tech "feature" I've ever used....
It's got to be the blue screen of death that came up, beginning with windows 95(?), when it couldn't read media (didn't matter if it was floppy, hard drive, cdrom, or network drive).
Of the customers I had who were used to the dreadful white box with 2 options and a system read error none of them were too amused to see a BSOD instead - they would then assume that their computer crashed (not even reading the screen) and restarted it from there. Also my experience with it has been more often than not, that particular BSOD had a tendency to lock the system up....
I would like to know who thought a BSOD was a good way to handle a media read error.
-Cprossu out
I personally like my room looking like a cockpit thank you very much - switches to turn off or cycle LED's routinely fail, leaving me without critical information (damn you Cisco!), like "oh no the lights on my network switch are blinking more out of control than normal, I better check my firewall logs to see who's trying to get in here" (and they come from anywhere, Texas, Malaysia, Canada, D.C., China, Russia, England, Germany, you name it, everyone seems to want to know my taxes and get my badly composed "music")
If a light should ever bug me that I can't unplug it (or are just too lazy to), for an instance the Check Engine Light in my car, or the "RPS Level Low" light over at the nuke plant I can utilize a little known technology called electrical tape(tm) to turn that evil light off for good.
I'll bet they feel great switching to windows and IIS now, more productivity and uptime eh?
when 98 came out I was making it run on 486/33's with 8mb of ram and a 255mb hdd for an ESL class because that's all I could get donated- since most were the same, it was a process of making a "super" machine (which I put a dx4/133 in and 64mb of ram) installing on that one, then copying it's hard drive to the others. I even put netscape communicator and office on those machines, got them on a network and the internet, and setup a network printer for them. It was alot of work, the computers were slow, but still usable. (only real big headache was the damn ISA network cards had to be individually setup, and since only one of the machines had a cdrom drive, there was alot of copying individual driver files by floppy from one computer to another...
I remember when 8mb was hot stuff (1994), and when 1mb was hot stuff (1990) in 96 32 was standard, and I remember dragging a old beat up original bugged pentium 75, a socket 4 pentium 60, and a 486dx/100(amd) into the world of 32MB, I tell you, it was screaming fast! (for like a week) now 2gb is becoming standard!
yep, I ran one with my 20" apple for years, love that little piece of hardware- some older apple monitors (Multiscan 15's and such) actually had db15's on them and came with an adaptor to make it work on a mac (?) we had a full lab of LC's with apple branded monitors that were db15 native and came with the inverse of that adaptor =)
enter palm
enter freeware
enter +
awesome hp48 emulator
hmm actually, I think it would be better to say
palm [ENTER]
freeware [ENTER] +
awesome hp 48 emulator
In other words
4:
3:
2:
1: palm [ENTER]
4:
3:
2: palm
1: freeware [ENTER] [+]
4:
3:
2:
1: awesome hp 48 emulator
Man, my hp48g (not even the gx) has saved me multiple times, I LOVE it, and I wouldn't use anything else- whenever I am forced to use another calculator, I always accidently enter it in rpn, I love the system so much I wish hp never stopped making them, and I had to track down a hp 32sII so I could do exams which forbid graphing calculators- the only bad thing is that sometimes professors I had back in college knew what I had and forbid me from using my 48g on anything- but anyway go old school hp and you can't go wrong, they are made for use, their quality is unparalleled, and you will enjoy using it and figuring out all it's time saving features- if nothing else you will gain a better understanding of principles behind math by simply using it. Just curious, has anyone here messed with hp's 'newer' graphing calculators like the hp50g? is it of the same quality as their older masterpieces?
I was thinking that too- I wonder if his temps would decrease or increase without the ionizer in the way- speaking of which he still has not yet put any solid temps up there to at least make us believe that it functions.
"The main reason we chose the Intel CPU is if for some reason there was a thermal issue it will self-protect the CPU unlike AMD's" Has he been living in a cave?, it hasn't been that way since the release of the Kt333 and Nforce chipsets for socketA, and never has had any issue on socket 754 and over Also he does mention the core 2 duo, but I am still surprised that he didn't build it around one in the first place, or at least something which puts out less heat than a pentium D at 3.2ghz..... and certainly he didn't think about building it around a mobile cpu like the older pentium M's or core duo's, turion or mobile sempron, or even a low energy X2.... and another little gripe--- the CFM's he is reporting seem wayyyy out of proportion, I don't think he knows how to differentiate a CFM from his ass.... I mean, look, the very expensive ones I see barely have enough flow to make a 5" long ribbon attached to it float...
No it would totally suck for audio production- could you imagine the transients caused by the high frequency HV system in that ionic air cleaner? It should play hell with the circuit and make groundings unclean- plus with a audio production pc, the pc and other equipment that makes noise (not including the one's and their equipment which is actually making noise to be recorded) is isolated from the actual interior of the recording studio in the first place... but I can just see high freq wines and switching being forced back through amplifiers and pickup equipment- correct me if I am wrong here
I was at least expecting a tribbles poster with something like "Just One is Never Enough"
I enjoy smoothwall as well, I have around 27 pc's behind it (a mixture of windoze, linux, and a few odd ones), a couple macs, some ancient hardware, and some MISC things....
I already built a replacement box for my poor old decrepit one and installed IPCOP on it, and so far, I've found that nearly every IPCOP forum has been hacked and not put back online and there are far fewer maintained mods for it than I was told.. I will probably overwrite it with smoothwall since it has been working for my uses for 2 years or so.
great program, the fellows who worked to make it what it is today deserve a gold star!
[Scotty Voice]Captain, Their Server Blew Up, She Couldn't Take The Pow'r[/Scotty Voice] Although it is defiantly interesting, and for what it's worth (and the very few seconds i saw of it) I like it =)