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“.

Syncback (the freeware edition – massive thanks to pp, aka ‘dopod’ for this one!) is first on this list for a reason. Everyone needs a good backup solution they can depend on. Don’t be like me losing my entire computer two Christmas’s ago when my RAM died whilst re-partitioning. Don’t be like my cousin Christie who lost all her year 12 work when her hard drive died, with no backup.

At home, I have a dedicated seperate hard drive now, purely for backing up, which I have happen all automatically at the click of a button, thanks to this awesome software. I then hide the portable hard drive somewhere else in the house in case we get robbed by burglars, and they want to steal my computer along with this nice shiny hard drive sitting right next to it. Even better still, take your portable hard drive and store it at a friends or relatives house several kilometres away, in case of natural disasters – but remember to back it up AT LEAST once a month!

I recommend that if you’re going to pay for an anti-virus software, use Trend Micro. If not, use AVG and Windows Firewall (instead of Trend Micro’s firewall – which is outstanding!). Use Spybot Search & Destroy to prevent spyware using the preventative measures, and Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware Personal and Spybot Search & Destroy together to cleanup spyware on the occasion it gets through. Make sure all your automatic updates are working and working frequently, windows is updating automatically and frequently, and your anti-virus software and spyware scanners are scanning frequently (once a week or so) and you’ll never have any problems. Oh yeah, and use Firefox and Thunderbird for internet and email, which will prevent 90% of spyware infections in the first place.

Trend Micro PC-Cillin Internet Security 2006

Trend Micro is my preferred masterpiece solution to all things virus related (prevention and cleanup) and firewall related (to stop hackers, and network worm viruses). It does not do anything for preventing spyware however, and so if you use it make sure you use Ad-Aware and Spybot as I’ve explained (above and below). It costs money which succs, so a good compromise I’ve found is to buy it anyway for one year to own the firewall, and when your virus updates run out after a year just once a week, manually download the virus pattern packs. (I tried doing this for a while once but then just ended up paying the money again because life is too short!) Trend Micro has also released spyware software but this also costs more money, and is pointless to buy when Spybot uses the same engine (I think I read somewhere – Trend bought their spyware engine from another company) as Spybot.

Lavasoft Ad-Aware Personal

Ad-Aware is the first thing I’d recommend doing when you suspect you have some internet filth floating around. Firstly, do it on the quick ‘intelligent’ system scan setting. Reboot, and if you really had troubles with your computer, scan again and make sure it searched your entire drive(s). Scanning once a week or so (and making sure you update before you do) on the system scan setting is highly desirable. This program is very user friendly to use and gets my thumbs up.

Spybot Search & Destroy

Spybot Search & Destroy not quite as user-friendly as Ad-Aware, although it’s also free and is the perfect compliment for cleaning spyware to Ad-Aware. Spybot S&D far exceeds Ad-Aware’s ability to prevent the internet crap from getting on (the technical term they use in the software is immunize – so be sure to explore clicking on that button!). The Tea-Timer in Spybot (under the advanced options) that when you install, will not allow any changes to the Windows registry unless your permission is granted. It would be interesting to install this Tea-Timer and then install Norton, and see how many hundred times you’d have to click accept! There is other stuff in Spybot that you can do to block spyware from the registry (if you don’t wish to use Tea-Timer). Basically, I’d recommend installing all the preventative features that this software offers, and none of Ad-Aware, to ensure they don’t overlap. Scan with this program after using Ad-Aware to guarantee you’ve got rid of everything – it will pick some stuff up that Ad-Aware doesn’t.

My webserver is randomly rebooting itself. I am scared. I’ve put the extra fans on, and the CPU and PSU fans on highest speed to see if temperature has anything to do with it rebooting – I reaLLy hope that it’s just overheating for whatever reason.