“bit of a catchup post”

Those that know me personally know why it has been such a long time since I last posted a blog update. For others, you probably don’t even care but I’ll explain anyway. Regardless of what Stephen and Ben say about how long it’s been since I’ve last posted and how bad this makes my blog, I’m still ranked #307 in “ State of the AustralianBlogs-osphere (or the noisiest bloggers in Oz) – Spring 2006“, whatever this means!

My computer crashed, and it crashed hard! I was experiencing random data loss, so I formatted, reinstalled system, and restored all data from my backups. This is a very lengthy process to do, and takes me about a week to do this as I have many other things I’d rather be doing like mountain biking, and things I’d prefer not to be doing like going to work (not to say I don’t enjoy it, but like most people there are days I’d rather just go mountain biking). So the computer then ran fine for a few days, the blog was restored, and then I experienced even more data loss. But this time it wasn’t just my downloads directory which had crashed, it was my webserver files, documents, and even some program files. This is when I knew there was a hardware error, and so the debugging began. It was a length process of torture testing the CPU for a few days using Prime95 then doing manufacturers disk checks on the hard drives (and my gosh, the windows chkdsk utility certainly didn’t help to “preserve” data shall we say). No errors with the CPU and hard drives, so I check the RAM with memtest86 and that was fine. Then I realised that the partitions that were failing were all from hard drives connected to my RAID controller, so I am confident this is the problem. Forum searches of this problem revealed that yes it most definitely is because of my RAID controller, although there didn’t seem to be any solutions, and so I just bought a new computer. I had by this time wasted several weeks of time debugging and if I had to buy a new motherboard to fix it, then it was just time to upgrade. So now I’m sporting (and consequently this blog is running from):

• Antec P180B case
• Antec Phantom 500 power supply
• Asus P5B-E Plus motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 CPU with Scythe Ninja heatsink
• GeIL DDRII 667MHz Dual Channel 2x1GB CAS 3-4-4-8 passively cooled RAM
• Asus 7600GS 256MB GeForce PCI-E passively cooled graphics card (with plans to upgrade in a year)
• Western Digital SATAII HDD’s with 16MB cache
• Windows Vista Ultimate and hating this operating system (will explain in a future post)

I’ve been working on making the computer whisper quiet, by duct taping all of the air vents in the box which stops sound waves coming out of the back of the box, and also forces the air to go through the air filters at the front. It is silly that the box has air filters when the air isn’t forced to go through them – c’mon Antec! I have also ordered some Scythe S-Flex brand fans to replace the Antec fans so this way the motherboard will be able to control the fan speeds according to temperature. The Scythe brand fans look to be really good quality, made with fluid dynamic bearings, and soft spin-up technology. Once I get these fans installed I’ll do a big post on the result and explain fully what I’ve done.

All in all, apart from having a new fans on the way to install, and not liking Windows Vista because it won’t let me run programs like Winrar without having to type in the administrators password, and not running the background programs for my motherboard without typing the administrator password EVERY TIME I REBOOT, I’m pretty much back on track and I guess you can expect this blog to be updated slightly more regularly from now on again

Apart from all this computer saga that I’ve been experiencing, I’ve been mountain biking at Eagle Park about once a week, spending time with Morven and our friends, the odd bit of gardening, doing stuff for the IET, experimenting in the kitchen with random food recipes, burning Morvens leg on my motorbike (sorry Morv!) and seeing her go in to emergency department of hospital, watching dodgy chick flicks with her afterwards to help her feel better, and watching the latest TV series I’m totally addicted to, which is called “24“.