For quite a while, I had been trying to convince Megan of the merits of a wired home network over a less reliable, albeit simpler, wireless only network. With summer fast approaching and the prospect of surviving an ascent to the attic in Phoenix looking more and more grim, I got the go ahead (and an eye roll.)
Ben committed to help out, and we picked up a bundle of cat5e cable. The attic was brutal - 30 years of caked on dust settled into the rolled fiberglass insulation, and a nearly asphyxiating heat. I attached the cable to a pulling rod and sent it down the hole with the electrical wiring to our kitchen. It was going to be easy from there on out.
To make a long story short, I punched a hole in the kitchen wall to pull the cable through and couldn't find it. Punched holes higher, to the left, to the right - nine in all before finding out that the electrical wiring was routed through the holes in the cinder block wall rather than behind the sheetrock. After punching 3 holes in the cinder block from inside, I finally found the end of the rod and pulled the cable through.
I sent the other end of the cable through the ceiling of our closet to the shelf where the modem and router would ultimately reside. Megan came home and was less than thrilled about the collateral damage from the affair. Pulling up a website on the new network and smiling did not seem to console her much. She took it amazingly well, considering most women would ship their husband to Abu Dhabi to live with Nermal under the circumstances.
She gave me the benefit of the doubt and is withholding judgment until the sheetrock repair is finished. How would you respond?
Friday, April 11, 2008
Sheetrock and Cinder Blocks
Monday, March 10, 2008
Hard Drive Crash!
Megan called me the other day to tell me she heard a clicking/chirping sound coming from the computer. The screen went black and wouldn't respond. A hard drive had died, but the question was, "which one?"
My system had two hard drives cannibalized from my old computer to save money. They were both about 2 years old. A 160GB drive housed Windows XP and applications, while the larger 200GB one served as storage for photos, videos, and documents. If the Windows drive had crashed, it meant the headache of reinstalling windows, but that all our personal media escaped unscathed. It turned out that the larger media drive had gone to the big drive bay in the sky. Fortunately, I had a Perl script backing up all our personal data nightly to the main drive.
I started grumbling and searching online for a replacement that I hadn't budgeted for. I vacillated between buying a sub $50 drive around 160GB -- smaller than I wanted, or springing for a larger 500GB drive for around $100. The larger drive was a better value, but neither option seemed to suit me. Growing up in an entitlement generation, I wanted more for less. Out of curiosity, I surfed over to the Seagate website since the remembered the drive having a five year warranty. I was surprised when I put in the serial number and it showed the drive being warrantied until 2011 -- 7 years from the time I bought it.
I filled out the online form and snickered at the option to upgrade my replacement to a 250GB model for $40 more. Nice try, Seagate, but I'll take the free replacement, thank you.
I felt a little hesitant that I couldn't erase the data on the dead drive. If it was refurbished, could our personal data be exposed to prying eyes? I decided it was a long shot, and couldn't think of anything too compromising if this did happen.
A week went by and, to my delight, I received a 250GB (refurbished) drive as a replacement. This was the upgrade they initially offered to charge me for. I snubbed my nose at "the man," and popped my free upgrade into our system. After a night of copying back the data, we were back in business. Crisis averted.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Newest Additions
For my birthday, Megan told me to order some things from my Newegg wish list -- without going too crazy. I decided on an internal card reader and a SATA DVD burner. Using a SATA optical drive will allow me to use the two larger IDE hard drives from our old computer on the single IDE motherboard connection I have to work with. I figured this was cheaper than springing a Franklin on a 500GB SATA drive, and it will give me 360GB capacity. This should be plenty, for now, until we fill it up with family videos or start using it as a PVR.
Here are the two products I chose:
Card Reader - the one from my wish list. It looks great with the black face plate, and includes a slot for microSD cards so you don't need an adapter. I ran a test downloading the same data from an Ultra II Compact Flash card using the reader and then our camera. I saw read speeds of ~9MB/s with the card reader. This is three times faster than downloading the photos using the camera itself.
DVD Burner - ASUS DRW-1814BLT - This drive is a perfect match for my system. It is the quietest drive I've ever (or never) heard. It's completely silent during DVD playback so you don't hear it during silent portions of movies. It also supports LiteScribe discs for burning your own labels on the disc face. What sealed the deal is that it included these features with a sub $30 price tag and free shipping. The only category this drive trails others at the same price point is that it burns at 18x speeds rather than 20x. But I'll trade an 11% slowdown any day to escape that constant purring that comes from those Lite-on drives that Dell stuffs in it's systems.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
The Wait is Over!
All of you that have been waiting on pins and needles to see my wish list on New Egg can now rest easy. Here it is. I've included the additions I'd like to make to my system in the long run. As far as priority of the list items, here is what I think:
1. Card Reader - cheapest item and will make a noticeable difference in the capability of my system. I'd hate to cough up 5 bucks shipping on a $15 item though, so it will probably be best to order with something else to save on overall shipping costs.
2. Hard Drive(s) - My system right now is using a 40GB hard drive just so I can use it until I can get a bigger one. Two identical drives would be great because I could use an Intel Matrix RAID setup to have a RAID 0 partition for performance and a RAID 1 partition to protect my data against hard drive failure. Three identical drives would be a dream because I could set up a RAID 5 partition, but this would fill up every possible drive slot in my case, so it probably isn't practical.
3. Memory (1GB) - The next most important item is a toss up between the graphics card and more memory, but neither is really vital at this point. I'll give memory the edge here since it is a quarter the price.
4. Video Card - The card on my list is perfect for my setup. It is the fastest card I've found that uses a passive heat sink rather than a noisy fan. Since I'm using a mobile processor, any faster card would turn my CPU into the bottleneck and would be a waste of money. This wouldn't be a high end gaming system, but it would rip the britches off of a PS3.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Watch Your Back!
You know, it just goes to show that you can't trust anybody.
(I am loosely qualifying this as a tech project since it involved Photoshop and our digital camera)
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
My Project's Transformation to a Media Center PC
Yesterday I moved the PC I built into our entertainment center. I did this for a few reasons. It frees up space in our bedroom where I had two PC's side by side sharing a monitor. It also replaces our current DVD player and it will function as a music player, and picture/video viewer for files stored on the PC. What I am most excited about is Netflix's "watch instantly" option. Now I can login to Netflix and instantly watch a movie on our TV without waiting for mail or going to the video store!
I ran into a problem with switching the onboard video output from the VGA port to the S-Video port. From reading customer reviews of the MSI Speedster 945GT motherboard, I knew this was an issue, but thought I knew the solution.
The problem lies in the fact that the integrated graphics driver for the board is intended to be used on notebooks since the board uses a notebook processor. If you boot the system and it finds a different video output than the last time it started, it will change the default output to the non-existant "notebook" display. The manual for the motherboard says to use Ctrl-Alt-F2 during boot to change the video output to TV, This didn't work for me. When I reconnected the monitor I had been using before to the VGA port, the display would not show up there either. I used Windows Remote Desktop to get on the system, but could not change the graphics output remotely. I about gave up and resorted to reinstalling windows as others had done to fix the problem. Fortunately, reinstalling the graphics driver from the remote desktop and rebooting the system with the monitor connected to the VGA port reset the default output to VGA. From there I could change the output to TV from the graphics system tray utility, then disconnect the VGA monitor. When I rebooted with the TV set as the output, it stayed that way. The documentation in the manual for changing the video output during boot seemed pretty straightforward, but does not work in this case.
After resolving this problem I had to set the graphics resolution to 800x600 in order for text to be readable on our TV. I use a wireless keyboard and mouse to run the system and it works pretty well so far.
The only issue is airflow in the entertainment center. I keep the doors closed to keep my one-year-old boy (who I absolutely adore!) out of trouble. This only leaves the small cable hole in the back of the cabinet for air to leave. With the doors closed the system idles around 39 degrees C and goes as high as 48 degrees under a load. This is around a 10 degree increase from when the system was out in the open. While these temperatures are low compared to a standard desktop system, I'll probably try enlarging the hole in the back to exhaust the hot air from the case better.
Happy viewing to us!
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Language Bar Be Gone!!
I don't think I am the only one that has been plagued by that blasted Windows language bar reappearing every time I reboot and wasting my already limited task bar real estate. It seems like this problem showed up with Service Pack 2 or an automatic update sometime later. I am all about being accommodating to those whose first language isn't English and showing the Language bar by default after installing Windows. However, if I manually go to the task bar properties and de-select the Language bar, why does Windows assume I've had a change of heart and want to welcome it back with open arms when I restart my system? I finally cracked and called on the Google S.W.A.T. Team for help rooting it out for good. Here is the effective treatment for XP's short term memory loss (you will need to do this once for each user, logged in to their account):
- Go to Start->Control Panel and open Regional and Language Options. (If you are using Category View for the control panel, you can find this under Date, Time, Language, and Regional Options)
- Click on the Languages tab, then click Details
- Under the Settings tab click Language Bar
- Un-check "Show the Language bar on the Desktop"
- Click OK on all the open boxes.
- Go grab a Tall Raspberry Crème Frappuccino at Starbucks to celebrate your newfound freedom (or a Venti sized if your significant other accompanies you).
