Joel Perry Productions

Right, moving on to the conclusion of this little episode, I’m sure I have more things to talk about from the last 6-9 months, but I’ll conclude this part now.

Now jumping back a little to August, after going through multiple conversations (via email) with ECS about my motherboard, I was informed I had to replace my power supply to continue the process, as having a bad power supply can cause all of the listed issues. so November 6th I was finally able to buy a new power supply, I think it is linked previously… if not….

in short it is an 80 plus certified modular 600w power supply, in short this means it guarantees an efficiency level of greater than 80% (I think a standard PS runs 40%-60% efficiency) and I went from pulling 145-186 peak watts (I’ve apparently forgotten how much it was pulling before, I know my old P4 pulled 185-235 watts) to only using 128 peak watts, so that was way cool, but did not really fix the problem. then they released a new Bios update and wanted me to try that. I did not see any reason for this, as the update only said it fixed issue with

Release Reason:

1.support new cpu:Athlon 64×2 5000+ (C2), Phenom II 945/925 (C3) (95W)

2.update C&Q rule

but I did it anyway, and I was able to load the Catalyst Control Center on the 3D page!! sweet, so I quickly started up DDO, and my PC shut off within 5 seconds. DOH!

I got everything started back up and emailed ECS again with the results. a couple days later I was informed my issue had been sent on to the RMA dept. a week after that I got my RMA acceptance, mailed my MB in about 10 days ago (USPS priority flat rate, in the original box with the static bag, and the squishy sheet that it sits on), the new-ish one came back in the mail UPS express a day earlier than UPS projected in the same box!! with my same static bag and squishy thing (yes I marked them) although the box was smooshed a little I was very impressed I got it back as I had been using it to hold some small parts in my PC parts bin. Those small parts (and internal PC cables) had been stuffed in a grocery bag in the interim.

Also during this time (obviously before I shipped the MB out…) I had a total HDD drive failure on a 200gig I was using to store my games and VHD’s – not cool, but I did had the VHD’s backed up. and it apparently is out of warenty as I could not get Seagate’s website to accept an RMA on it. Well that drive now is proudly displayed as 2 Drive platters, one hanging on my office cube wall so I can see people sneaking up on me, and the other is on a co-workers cube wall for the same reason. (not me, but so he can see people sneaking up on him….)

Alright, I think that is most of what happened in a nutshell. If I think of anything else, you can be sure I’ll post it up here.

More from Finndo

• couple of updates to the site…
• just a quick post about the blog…
• bringing the past to the future….

Right, so lets see if I can close this back story up now (edit: okay, I broke it up into 2 posts, as it was getting pretty long!!). not that I am not enjoying recalling my endevors, but it might actually take me longer to recount all of it if I keep up the pace I have been following. So, onward.

I RMA’d one of my Seagate HDD’s, a 240gig, I was disappointed they did not offer me an “upgrade” option. When you RMA with Seagate they “may” give you the option of upgrading to a different model (in the same series) at a discounted rate; however this was not an option with my drive. Needless to say I was disappointed, as I would have loved to get a larger drive in exchange as I may just be upgrading it anyway. well after almost 3 months of begging and hunting for a box from someone to ship the drive out, I started getting bad sector reports from another drive (may have mentioned this in a previous post) so I decided I was going to buy a 640gig 7200 RPM SATA2 with a 32 meg cache drive and ship my RMA out in the box that the new drive would come in. Things happened, and I ended up doing something else with the money. So one day I was digging around for stuff in the bin I keep my pc parts and cables in.

time for another tangent… at least this one is related. I move a LOT, actually right now is the first time I have stayed in an apartment complex for more than 12 months, and on average I move every 6-9 months. Except for the few times I have lived in a house, this is actually the first time my street address has not changed at least once in a calendar year since the 18 months I spent at the same apt in college (that was a decade ago if you are curious). So anyways… I have found that moving in garbage and grocery bags is very non-productive. so one year (I have no idea how long ago, although I do at least know in what state!!) I was wandering around in a Target (I think, could have been Walmart, but I do not think so) and saw that Christmas colored 14-18 gallon plastic bins were on sale ½ price (this would be either January or February) so I bought 23 +/- 3 or 4 plastic bins, and have been moving in them ever since, several of them got left in my parents place in Las Vegas, but other than those (and the ones I returned after moving that year (late 90’s)), I still have some of those that I am using today. Since then I have picked up some lovely Halloween colored bins as well, and a couple blue ones when I had to move in the middle of the summer a couple of times these last 4 or 5 years.

So, my pc parts are in a Halloween bin, onwards… I was digging through my PC parts bin and came across the box for the 500gig Maxtor (Maxtor is now Seagate) Western Digital Caviar green HDD I bought in Best Buy 2 or 3 years ago, it had a plastic clam shell instead of the foam padding, but it was “original packaging” so I figured it should count… got it packaged up and shipped out (this was late October, early November. yes I sent the RMA in during late June, early July, and YES, I had to submit a new one). my replacement drive came back nice and quick and is working well.

(edit: right forgot to mention this post was generated using Firefox on a Fedora 12 Virtual machine)

More from Finndo

• couple of updates to the site…
• just a quick post about the blog…
• just some interesting news I found online…

going back any farther would be trying at best…

Ok, the second Monday of the month I started my new job (still there at the time I am writting this) the last week of the month I ordered a Sheeva Wall Computing Plug Developers kit (wikipedia page, Marvell page, where to buy the developers kit) estimated shipping 6 – 8 weeks, was hoping it would arrive on my B-day…

I already added the tags for this page (and there are a lot) so I’m just going to jump down to May 2009…

I decided it was time to upgrade my computer, I had an HP Pavillion A730n with a Pentium4 530 3.0GHz HT and 2.5 GB of 184 pin DDR1 PC3200 RAM, I did have a GeForce 8800GT in it at least.  So, I bought some new hardware to build my own computer (much cheaper, and you really can pay as you go…) 

 Total spent (including shipping) $514

I missed out on all the mail in rebates, because you only get 21 days to get them sent in AND you cannot return or exchange something if you clip the UPC out.  well it actually is a good thing I didn’t do it, as I had to return the RAM I bought for a replacement (accidently got the DDR2 the first time)

Added the HDD’s I already own, a Rosewill 450W powersupply I already had (almost 2 years old) and used an HDMI cable to connect it to my 42″ Sony TV, had a heck of a time setting everything up, first there was a BIOS update so that my CPU and RAM would be recognized by the MB.  Then they were correctly identified in all ways but one… the MHz rating on the CPU was showing as 800MHz per core, and the ram was coming up as 7-7-7-24 (and still does, but this does not bother me, after what I was using before)

Everything was starting to work ok, I had my system running stable and had started installing my apps again (was using Windows Vista Ulitmate x64) and a new BIOS update was available, I gave it a shot and it fixed some of the “automatically detected” settings in the BIOS so I was happy.  Well then I tried going dual monitor with a 19″ HDTV I have, that way I did not have to remote in when my wife was watching tv in order to do anything.  That is when all the problems started happening.  The computer would just turn off randomly after 4-30 minutes of use.  So I submitted a help ticket with ECS as when I dug into it, co-workers started to tell me it sounded like a “bad pipeline in the video card” which just happens to be the on-board video (AIT Radeon 3300HD).

After I was given that information, I started testing it, and sure enough, if I ran SETI at home GPU edition, the computer would crash, if I loaded the ATI Catalyst Control Center and went to the 3D settings screen, as soon as the demo animated the PC would crash, if I loaded World of Warcraft, the PC would crash before it even finished loading the login screen (note here, I was playing WoW on this computer before; however it would crash faster and faster.  It started after 2 hours of play, then each time after that was quicker and quicker and at first I thought it was the game), so I quit playing WoW as I could not get it to work, not even after new video drivers came out.  I Tried DDO Unlimited when it went free, the Game would crash as soon as it tried to load the characters on character select.  After a few hundred attempts to get something to work, I finally got a pop-up message from windows, telling me the Video Card Driver had recovered from an unexpected crash.

 ok, so I covered part of July in there too, new post and I’ll pickup some June stuff then move on…

More from Finndo

• couple of updates to the site…
• Fedora 12, VirtualBox, and Shared folders – a How To
• just a quick post about the blog…