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…

After this post I should catch up to the here and now pretty quick…

right, so I had (finally) Ubuntu running with all the hardware working, and started messing with wine and trying to get World of Warcraft and DDO to run.  no good that was.  both were requiring the newest video drivers from AMD (I think that was what was wrong, never quite figured it out…) the games would both load but would fail at some point, and have other issues… including not allowing me to login or play…   Well the video driver issue ended up being that (yes it did install fine) the on-board video on the laptop had just (and I do mean within a couple of weeks/a month or two) been taken out of the newest updates, and had been placed in the “legacy drivers” list.  mean while, before I actually figured this out, was installing dot net (nearly every version) into wine, and flash, and java, and all kinds of stuff.  I Was getting really excited, the laptop was working great, even if not with the OS I really wanted.  especially since I could not find this model on the inet anywhere as being functional in linux. (the wireless and audio is what normally fails to function, and I had both working in more than one flavor of linux)

then one day at work a co-worker was looking into selling an old IBM T40 laptop and we were shocked to see people paying $150 or more for them.  so I decided what the heck… I put my laptop on Craig’s list one after noon about 3pm.  I had 4 emails and 3 phone calls before 8pm that night.  decided to sell it to the first caller, they wanted win XP, so I wiped it (oh well, good learning experience) and set it up for them, then they had to postpone coming to get it, because of a dinner party they had forgotten about, then they were not sure if they could get it, and told me to not hold it for them anymore.  well I did not get it sold, and now had win XP barebonez’d on it and login ID’s setup for people who would never see it, let alone use it.

oh well, not sure if I mentioned this or not, but I started having some wierd HDD errors on my semi-new desktop PC.  failed writes, ticking noises while the drives were spinning, drives disappearing, then coming back after rebooting… it looks like I may have 2 or 3 bad HDDs.  I get all the data moved off the Seagate that was reporting bad sectors and I get an RMA setup, quick and painless… now I just need to find a box, or “original shipping packaging”  anyone who has not had this on hand and has had to look for it will know.  it’s not real easy to find a custom fitted HDD packaging that perfectly fits the box you plan on sticking it in, and has a minimum of 2″ of foam on all sides.  So I decided to ask around at work… I also submitted a tech help request with ECS, the manufacturer of my motherboard, as I was having both video problems AND HDD issues at this point.

on to the next issue that was going on…

so I had to go to Pittsburgh for training for work, 1 week, 2 semi-high level virtual server training courses taught by an IBM instructor (AU72 AU78 and AU73 the AIX Virtual I/O Server training.  I’ll check at work tomorrow and will update if wrong on those –updated).  had an awesome time in Pittsburgh, got to meet the team I was working with virtually, and learned a tonne of stuff. (I prefer the metric tonne to the American ton, so much more useful, and a conversation piece when used in writing… pictures are available on picasaweb there are not a whole lot of images (50 something), I was working (and no I did not take any images of where I was working, but there is a hint about for whom I do work.  sorry folks I might slip somewhere, but company policy severely “suggests” that I do not disclose anything about my employment that is not necessary…) most of the time (working that is, I got distracted and used one of my parenthetical explanations that I am overly fond of and are truly not necessary, nor wanted by most.  HOWEVER, and this is the good part, I am writing this, not you, and you are not paying me to do so!! SO!! I will use excessively long descriptions/mental overture if you will, at my discretion.  I sure hope Wordpress has a good spell checker, cuz I make up words all the time)  umm… now where was I?

oh yeah, I was working most of the time, and so only took a few pictures, now that I no longer have a semi-pro DSLR (Canon 20D) I am stuck taking pic’s with a semi-crummy Kodak 6mp point-and-shoot.  Back to the point.. The weekend I got back from Pittsburgh, and I had to move, across the hall from a nice 1150-ish sq ft 2 BR apt to a kinda cramped 950-ish sq ft 1 BR apt.   Things got switched around, and now my Sheeva Plug fails 80% of the system checkpoints during bootup (not that I blame the move, just that I had no problems with it before this).  it still functions (ie. turns on and I can log in via the console), except the network port interface is kaput… (defined as “ka·put also ka·putt (kä-p t, -p t, k-) adj. Informal. Incapacitated or destroyed.” at www.thefreedictionary.com/kaput )  (fyi I still have not gotten around to reflashing the ROM on it, which I learned back in early june, is necessary to allow the usage of SD Media Cards.) 

HA! not sure what I talked about in this one, was a little distracted (doing some things on my desktop in preparation to RMA the MB…) but I’ll go ahead and post it as I hit 1k words.

More from Finndo

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