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Yeah, I've been dead for awhile, not to mention my computer as well. It seems I have a never ending
nightmare with trying to keep a computer running long enough just to use it. I haven't been feeling well
the past couple of days, and as you can see, I haven't been on the net in over a month. I hope to fix
that eventually, as I've slacked on a lot things, and I need to get caught up on all my postings and updatings
to websites.
Account stuff; for now, I say just leave it as is. Once we get back into managing the
site again, we'll figure out what to do with that. I'm gonna try and be around more, but that's
getting hard for me. Lately, I've been working on a lot of portfolio stuff, trying to update some of my
old models and animations.
I figure I should be around more next week, I hope.
I'm not really doing anything, I'v got only one class and the teacher isn't giving us all that
much to do. I really should be working on portfolio stuff, I started something a month ago but I haven't
worked on it in a while. I stared making an environment but I only feel like making a character now and since
my class is character development I don't want to start making anything until its assigned.
I look
forward to hearing about how Vista runs, I'v seen a lot of articles (10 reasons to get vista, 10 reasons not to
get vista) there were a lot of good reasons to get it and most of the reasons not to get it were pretty lame.
There were two reasons not to get it that I paid attention to, a lot of programs have issues with vista, Nero,
Symantec Anti virus, Firefox, and the other problem is that the licence can only be transfered to another computer
once before its useless. There were a bunch of cool reasons to get it though, image based install – the DVD
holds a preinstalled image of windows so its a really quick install, it has a 19,500 driver base so whatever
hardware you have it has the most up to date drivers for it, this one made me laugh – sleep mode that actually
works, an undelete function – a nice feature. So be sure to tell us how it works and how long it took
you to crash or freeze it.
Yeah, like I said earlier, I understand that people are busy. It happens. I also understand the
desire to be AWAY from the computer. And Greg, I feel your pain dude. I hate it when there's a
never ending battle to keep your computer running. It sucks huge monkey balls.
As far as
Vista is concerned, technically, its kinda low on my list of priorities for awhile. Im currently working on a
huge development project at the moment. After that is my transition to tech, where Vista will be one of the
things I'll get to work with. Ive seen those articles on Vista and a lot of the reasons to not get Vista
are lame. However, I think once its been out long enough to get a service pack applied to it, it should be a
lot better. One of the things I'll be looking to do initially is start turning off all of the glamorous
crap like aero and getting back to the classic mode. Im pumped about the image based install.
That'll make configuring Windows the way you want it a lot easier. My biggest beef so far is that Vista
is supposed to take up 16 GB with a default install. Thats crazy!!!! Also I cant see upgrading my
computer to more than a gig of RAM and not being able to run decently is stupid. At least right out of the
box. One thing I am happy to finally see is that Vista now will prompt you if you dont have correct
permissions to escalate your permissions by typing in a username and password with the correct privileges.
Linux and Unix have had that feature for awhile. One thing Im also happy to see is that Microsoft is now
cracking down on third party software vendors writing out to the kernel. In my opinion, communicating with the
kernel is one thing, but you shouldnt be allowed to write out to it. That could cause serious problems.
I wish they would have finished the WinFS though. I think they could have done a lot of good with improving
the file system by use of a relational database. Basically, they're saying that Vista doesnt have a lot
of features that arent already available for Windows XP (IE7, Windows Defender). Mostly, its a lot of security
fixes and improvements, which I'll be interested to see. Only problem is that in order to upgrade to
Vista, you better have a DVD-ROM handy, as its coming out on DVD. Drivers are also going to be a huge issue,
but they usually are for new versions of Windows. While Microsoft has included a lot of drivers, there is also
a good chance that older hardware, as well as lesser known hardware vendors, wont have compatible drivers right
away.
As soon as I have more data, I'll post it.
Hmm, i'm not sure how much space the current windows takes up but i'v only got 12 gigs left on my
hard drive. I may need to figure out how to install my second hard drive on to this computer. I tried to
put it in a few weeks ago when I was switching out my graphics card but I couldn't even figure out where the
original hard drive was… ok it's an hour and a half later and I now know more about hard drives.
The weird looking thing, half the thickness of a normal hard drive with some weird looking wires sticking out of it,
is a serial ATA hard drive and I now know my motherboard specs… ok it's about another half hour later
and I know a lot about UltraDMA and I know my motherboard supports UltraDMA. So now my question is can IDE and
serial ATA hard drives work at the same time?
Yes they can, last year I was running a SATA drive and 2 IDE drives in my computer. The only thing I
can't remember is what the jumpers on the IDE drive should be set to. I think, since you just have one,
that setting it to cable select should work just fine. Because, once your computer looks for the boot record,
it should load up the SATA drive as the primary drive once Windows starts (I say that, cuz I've had
wrong hard drives and OS's booted before, back when I ran thinks like dual installs).
I also figured
that your computer is capable of UltraDMA, most computers within the last 5-6 years have been. I know all mine
have been, even my old 133MHz PC (which I need to get out of the basement sometime and boot it back up, some things
I want to do in Win3.1 with it).
My biggest beef with Vista is that, right away, it's going to blow
— it'll crash all over the place, have massive security issues, and just plain buggy (as every new Win release
is). Waiting for a service pack or two should help fix that. Also, I don't like the idea of all the
resources is has to hog for no reason. Yeah, I'd turn off all the MacOSX ripped off graphics/bubbly
hippie crap before I'd ever use it (as I do with XP), but even then, it's still going to hog an
unbelievable amount of resources. Precious resources that I don't feel the need that I have to upgrade
just yet (like my RAM); and my video card is really good at running pretty much all of the current games right now
under XP, but it'll be a useless paperweight once I upgrade to Vista.
So, I'm probably gonna
wait awhile before even messing with Vista, probably around the time when GeForce10 cards are cheap, and quad core
processors are the norm.
Cool I'm going to have to put that hard drive in. I put it in before but attached it to the same
IDE cable my dvd was running from. The hard drive showed up in device manager but not in My Computer. I
guess i'll probably need to string out an ULTRA DMA cable from my motherboard to only go to the new hard
drive. I think the jumper setting is set to slave on the HD.
If you have both an SATA and an IDE controller, which alot of PC's have now, then your SATA should be the
primary channel, while your IDE will be the secondary channel, If you're trying to use both an IDE HDD and
another device, cable select will work. However, its really a good idea to put the hard drive as the master
and the other device as a slave. Or basically, so the hard drive is read first. Since I believe the MBR
is going to look for operating systems in the order in which drives are read in the BIOS. Its amazing what you
learn when things dont work.
The interesting thing about Vista is that they're already talking about
a service pack due out possibly later in the year. However, they've already pushed back the next service
pack for XP, which is now slated for sometime in 2008, as Vista is more of a priority than XP. Until then,
have fun patching XP with somewhere around 65 or so additional patches to SP2. The first thing I plan on doing
when I get Vista is turning off all of the bells ans whistles that Microsoft keeps shoving down our throats. I
want a classic environment. The other yuppies running Vista can decide for themselves how they wish to
run. I posted a summary of Vista requirements and whatnot on the MT site last night. I'll be
interested in seeing what Vista does out of the box. I would be super impressed if I didnt find some bug
within the first week.
Greg, I seriously need to get some time together to get my 133 back up and
running. I miss the days of 3.1, when things actually worked and there was no registry, or group policy, or
user login. Just plain old DOS. Those were the days man. “Ummm, how do you run
ScanDisk?” Im thinking we need to have another building day where we just get together and put computers
together. Wish my home office was big enough to support having all of that stuff though. Been thinking
of building up one of my old 333's as well with 98. Ive actually got a 333 at home running Win2k server
at the moment. Im using it for DHCP, since the damn DHCP on my router stopped working a few months back.
I may be in the market for a new router in the next few months. Ive had mine for about 4 years and its on its
last leg. I may try upgrading the firmware on it,but that means internet down time.
I think I heard somewhere that the first SP for Vista was going to come out sometime in March, since
they've been working out the bugs since the unofficial Vista launch a few months ago.
And yes
I learned quite a bit about hard drives yesterday. It was pretty confusing when I looked up my hard drive, it
said Serial ATA, so I looked it up and the first sites I see say “ATA is just another name for IDE” so I
look at my hard drive and I'm like “the hell it is”. Then I see ATA and Serial ATA are
completely different. It has to be so complicated.
I got the hard drive installed today and its working pretty well after tcolvinMI helped me figure out
formating.
I took a picture of my
computer to show how nice alienware organizes the wires. You'll notice the hard drive is in backwards,
thats because alienware strung all of the power cables around the back of the case. I didn't feel like
opening the other side so I was only able to find one cable by the hard drive slots. It didn't stretch very far
out so I had to put the drive in and feel around to get the power cable in.
I have also noted on the
image the suspected zombie fan. Its the only one I think it could be although it's awfully small to be
making such a loud groaning noise. It doesn't come on very often but when it does it's loud.
Yeah, formatting using 2000 and XP is a little confusing. You have to go into Disk Management, which
can be accessed several places, but can be found under Administrative Tools, Computer Management. There's
an option in the tree on the left for Disk Management. When putting in a new hard drive that hasnt been
formatted, it will recognize the disk as unallocated. This means you have to set up a partition for it, which
can be the entire amount of the disk. I believe it gives you the option from there to format the disk.
If not, once you've partitioned it, if you right click on the partition, the option to format is there.
Definitely not like the old days when you went out to DOS and typed format <<drive
letter>>:
Ah yes, I miss dos. The only way to get your fix on these new computers is to
go into command prompt but its just not the same. I remember you just type in run win and you get that awesome
8-bit windows splash screen to come up, and running games in dos was great even though it took quite a bit of
troubleshooting to get them to work at first. Oh ya and I would always forget how to list directories in
columns instead of one long stream.
A few thoughts:
Everythings become stagnant on the site as of late.
Everyone must be hellabusy because I havent seen anyone post in at least a month. Its funny how posts on this
forum seem to come in spurts. Although, I do understand completely how it is to be busy, as I have been
myself.
Ive decided to halt the development of the Mightor Industries redesign until I have more time to
focus on it. Greg, if you've got some free time, I'll be happy to start working on the design of the
site again, time permitting, but I really dont want to do anymore with it until we've got a good design laid
out. In the meantime, the MI site is using blogger to power its pages. There is a link to the forum on
that page, in case anyone runs across the site.
Ive also changed the look and feel of the Mightor
Technologies page. Basically I got bored fighting with Joomla, so I decided to use WordPress instead. So
far, Im much happier with how thats working out.
Ive noticed a couple of new registrations on the
forum, but have not yet seen any posts. I havent decided if Im going to allow the accounts to expire after a
certain period of time or not yet. Some input on this might be helpful. While I dont want to disable
accounts simply because of inactivity. I also dont want people signing up and never posting. This will
obviously become more difficult to manage as more users sign up, but in my opinion, if you're gonna register,
post something.
In other news:
Im working a lot right now, as we're getting ready tomove our software to support multiple stores. This is taking up a good portion of my time. In addition
to that, Ive decided to pick at InstallShield a little for automating our install process at work. I'll
attempt to post some things on the MT site as I make progress. Its slow at the moment since my focus is on
work development.
Vista's coming out soon. And while I dont usually upgrade right away,
because of the need for it at work, I'll be upgrading as soon as I can get a hold of a copy. I'll
post stuff for that as well. If anyone comes across any reviews of Vista, feel free to post them on the forum,
as Im sure we're all interested in what Vista is capable of.
That is all….someone else post…
Tim
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