HARDWARE

Woot.com had a deal a few days ago that was too good to pass up. They were offering 30GB Zunes for $85. Impossible, you may say, but nay I say to you, it was very possible, and I have my white Zune in my hand to prove it!

Why were they so cheap? The catch was that all the units being offered were factory-refurbished. All this meant was that they might show up with some cosmetic blemishes from previous use; what it meant to me was that I would finally have my own high-capacity MP3 player! Sure, I'd gotten used to using my Pocket PC as a media player, but now that I have an entire 30GB at my disposal, I don't think I can ever go back to listening to 2GB of music!

Strange_Will got one, too, citing that he could earn the money in a couple nights' worth of tips from his pizza delivery job, and I'm inclined to believe him. And if you're reading this, Will, I've forgotten your Zune here in Riverside (just kidding, PLEASE don't eat any puppies [without me]).

And on top of the $85 Zune I also picked up, free of charge, a Zune travel kit that is supposedly valued at $100...those crazy Woot.com people, I'll never figure out how they manage to offer such crazy prices on stuff. The travel kit comes with some of Microsoft's "premium" headphones (which are supposedly leagues better than the standard headphones included with my Zune), an extra sync cable, a wall adapter so I can charge my Zune without a USB port, headphone splitters with independent volume control (fancy, yah?), and a case to put all that and my Zune in. All in all, I'd say I made out like a bandit.

I'll review it in a couple days because some people (you know who you are!) aren't convinced of the Zune's capabilities...I'm not, either, but now I have one to play around with.

And I'm going home on Wednesday for the Thanksgiving weekend...sucks to be the rest of you non-Americans, what with Columbus NOT discovering your new, fertile grounds and killing hundreds of thousands of your natives, you all have to work the entire week!

Have a good one, guys ;)

It turns out things were not as bad as they appeared regarding the apparently "dead" motherboard I received from Newegg.com.

No, the problem was a result of operator ignorance and error...I took the motherboard for granted and applied two year old knowledge to a problem today. It turns out that I had missed a plug when I hooked the computer up. What plug did I miss? Take a look at the picture below and see if you can guess what plug I might have missed:

Now, to find out for yourself what POWER PLUG I missed, just click the picture...I'll wait.

YES! That's right, I forgot to plug in the 4-pin 12v power cable to the motherboard. In my defense, I'd never worked on a computer that was new enough to use this plug, and there was no mention of the socket in the manual. I found out the error in my ways only after going to Fry's, dropping $118 on a new motherboard and power supply, installing the new board, and then having my good friend William point out that maybe, JUST MAYBE, I might want to plug that 4-pin connector in. After getting the new motherboard to beep, I tried the same set up with the board I thought had died and *Beep Beep* it worked!

So now, I have to apologize to Newegg.com (Sorry, Newegg, for thinking that you'd taunt me with faulty hardware), kick myself in the butt (I'm standing as I write this), and then see if Fry's will be nice and allow me to return hardware I purchased out of stupidity...

And so there you have it, my new computer is up and running, and OMG the difference in performance is night and day. I took a couple screenshots of Half Life 2: Lost Coast at 1280x1024 and with 16x AF and 6x AA to show off the power of the ATI Radeon x1600XT I have chugging away under the hood:

A picture of the coastline, showing off HDR

The level of detail on the fisherman is phenomenal, especially with all the graphic settings turned way up.

That's it for the evening, good night!

After removing EVERYTHING from my computer (all boards and drives), and after cleaning the entire case, and after carefully and with the utmost care placing the motherboard, CPU, RAM, and video card, the computer won't POST...

*big sigh*

So I have to figure out what the problem is. I've tried turning the computer on with only RAM and CPU in place, with RAM, CPU and video card in place, and even went so far as to unplug the RAM but keep the video card in. In all instances, there was no system beep and I tested each configuration twice, each time with the speaker plugged in both possible ways.

Initial talks with friends and people in the hardware community indicate that the problem may be a bad motherboard, but I don't want to believe that my brand new hardware has ALREADY failed and it has not been in my hands for more than 3-4 hours.

I'll keep everyone posted about the problem, but I will greatly appreciate your input as to what might be causing this problem

I'm in the process of upgrading my tower PC because its showing signs of motherboard failure. I've found the processor, motherboard, RAM, and video card that I want, but I've been having a bear of a time trying to find out if I can run the RAM I want to buy on the laptop I've chosen.

Maybe you guys can help me. I want to purchase this ASRock AM2V890-VSTA motherboard along with this 1GB stick of DDR2-800 (PC 6400) RAM.

The problem I'm having is with the voltages. The motherboard doesn't have any actual RAM voltage settings in its BIOS (other than Low, Normal, High, and Auto), so its hard to know what voltages the motherboard supports. One site mentions that the motherboard is rated for RAM at 1.8v, but this isn't the motherboard's manufacturer, so I can't be 100% sure. The RAM says its rated at 1.9v-2.0v. The question I have is, will this RAM work with this motherboard, taking into account the voltages? Does RAM work if its functioning under a lower voltage?

And that announcement? It really wasn't that amazing, only that Dell upgraded my Axim x50 to an x51 for free...I have a chat log, so I might go ahead and post that and explain how I cheated the system in my next entry :P

Lesson of the day: NEVER try to squeeze extra performance out of your video card by flashing the card's ROM. I came across an article describing how I can unlock my ATI 9550 and essentially make it a 9600 Pro, whose design the 9550 is based off of.

So the flashing goes as easy as the instructions make it sound, but when I booted back into Windows and attempt to install new drivers for my "ATI 9600 Pro", after restart my resolution would not go any higher than 640x480 @ 4bit color.

Obviously, this was not good enough for me, so I proceeded to try three other video card drivers (ATI's default set and two soft-modded driver packages, one of which I [used] to use); as luck would have it, NONE of them showed an improvement in screen resolution after restart. Unfortunately, nothing changed when I flashed my video card's ROM back to normal.

So now, two hours later, I have an ATI card that works fine (just barely, but at a default resolution of 1024x768) when no drivers are installed, and works like crap with drivers installed. Thankfully, a former teacher of mine gave me his old BFG nVidia Geforce FX 5500 video card earlier last year, so I'm going to go ahead and install video drivers for that; I don't anticipate anything going wrong, but only time will tell.

God, I feel dumb =(

Earlier this year, I posted an article on creating an unattended XP installation disc. I was at a point where I needed to reinstall Windows, so I went ahead with that project and created an up-to-date copy of XP that installed without me needing to be there (hence, 'unattended').

Well, besides MSTSC support that mysteriously didn't get installed, my copy of XP seemed to be quirk free...until now. Over the last 6 months, I've watched as my computer slowly fell apart from the inside out. In the last month alone, I've had to deal with a Firefox profile that...deleted...itself? I dunno what happened, but the toolbars were all organized differently and my booksmarks were deleted. I was able to restore Firefox to working condition, but today my 200GB Maxtor harddrive failed to write files twice, forcing a hard reboot each time. At one point during reboot, BIOS didn't even recognize the drive, reporting it as an apostrophe instead of its model name. Windows wouldn't boot with the bad drive attached, so I thought I was totally screwed.

Its like my computer doesn't want to do its job anymore. I had moved all my important personal files to the faulty harddrive before[/i] it was faulty, since it was newer than my primary drive and I wanted to have my files seperate from the harddrive that contained the OS. As luck would have it, the drive was recognized after being unplugged for about an hour, so I took what little time I had left with the drive to transfer all of My Documents, all of my [i]web sites in localhost root (talk about a near heart attack!!!), all my music, and my collection of RvB.

Now, I just have to get some money together to purchase a new harddrive to replace the one that kept freeking out; I'm not about to risk anymore files to a hard drive that intermittently works...oh, and in relation to the title, I suppose most of the problems can be contributed to the method I used to install XP this time around.

Can you believe I've installed XP a total of six times on this machine? Its only been, what, 2.5 years since I built it, and I'm preparing for a seventh reinstallation of my OS. As I told a friend recently: "Windows is like a really bitchy but super hawt girl...so many things to do with her, but sometimes its just too much to deal with"

File recovery can be a bear, especially if you're trying to recover the family's business documents off of a hard drive that mysteriously goes kaput during an OS upgrade.

Enter the freeware file recovery application PC INSPECTOR File Recovery.

PC INSPECTOR File Recovery is the best software-based file recovery program I've ever found that is completely free for anyone to use. I got a crash course on how it worked early last year, and I was very impressed. Here's my story:

I had to recover files off a drive that, for some unknown reason, prevented me from viewing its contents. I was upgrading my parents' computer to Windows XP when the old hard drive containing their previous OS and files failed to be recognized by the new OS. The drive in question was receiving power and was spinning up, but there was no easily identifiable reason for the drive not being accessible through XP. That's when I found the File Recovery program.

Using this program, I was able to read the contents of the improperly functioning hard drive, recover all of my parents' important documents off the drive, put them onto my computer, and then transfer the files to the new hard drive.

File recovery in general is not for the weak of heart or the eagerly excited. This program takes some patience to learn and patience to sit through one or two entire drive scans because you accidentally chose the incorrect scan options. I would advise anyone interested in using this program to get a competent, technology-savvy individual to help you out. There are times when impatient individuals may mistake their computer freezing up for a system crash, when in reality the program is using 100% of the CPU to scan the culprit drive. Scans of drives can also take upwards of 15-20 minutes; it is important during this time to leave the computer that is scanning the drive alone unless you want to brick your drive and lose all of your data (or, if you prefer to to pay for professional, $1000+ harddrive recovery...).

I took the liberty of capturing some screens of the program to show you what it looks like in action:

1. You have the option of recovering accidentally deleted files, scanning a drive for accidentally formatted files, and recover an entire drive if it fails to show up.

2. After your computer is scanned for attached hard drives (regardless of if they're recognized by Windows or not), File Recovery shows you all the drives it can scan. Choose one and click the check-mark.

3. You'll see a progress bar displaying how far into the scan the program is; don't expect it to move real fast, especially if you're recovering files off of a large-capacity drive.

3a. During the scan, its not unusual for the program to use close to 100% of the CPU and for your computer to run like molasses.

4. When the scan is complete, you'll get an explorer-esque file tree of all the files that you've "deleted". To recover a file, click on the folder you want to recover, right-click and select "Save to...". Choose an output folder (on another drive, obviously) and the program will recover the presumed-lost files. The same works for drives that no longer display under My Computer on XP.