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…
• bringing the past to the future….
• getting my PC to function…

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 some interesting news I found online…
• Fedora 12, VirtualBox, and Shared folders – a How To

not too much content this time (unless I get carried away again).  couple of neat articles I read today (not the most trusted sources for news, but you have to make your own decisions… (both the things I started this post to talk about came from blogs.zdnet.com ) (another note, all links on my site “SHOULD” open in new windows, for some reason they never implemented “open link in a new tab” feature to HTML, or I just haven’t found it yet)

VirtualBox 3.1 - has been released with it’s new “big” feature… “teleport”.  some people might recognize this as being extremely similar to IBM’s Power System’s Live Partition Mobility.  in a nutshell this means:

Partition mobility provides the ability to move a logical partition from one system to another.  Live (or active) partition mobility allows you to move a running logical partition, including its operating system and applications, from one system to another.  The applications do not need to be shut down.  Inactive partition mobility allows you to move a powered off (or deactivated) logical partition from one system to another.

Live Partition Mobility
Live partition mobility allows you to migrate running AIX and Linux partitions and their hosted applications from one physical server to another without disrupting the infrastructured services.  The migration operation, which takes just a few seconds, maintains complete transactional integrity.  The migration transfers the entire system environment, including processor state, memory, attached virtual devices, and connected users.

(actually quoted from the IBM training manual for IBM course AU78 “System p LPAR and Virtualization II: Implementing Advanced Configurations”  a training class I took in July of this year) and so it goes on… (I guess I just killed the “no long post” part at the beginning…)  This has to be the coolest thing I have ever seen/witnessed/done in my life.  I setup an LPAR (logical partition) on a System p server, installed AIX 6.1 on it, then while another person in the training class was logged in and doing something in the server, I migrated it to another physical machine in less than 15 minutes with less than 5 seconds of down time (monitored with a CPU and HDD activity monitors running on the virtual server and a custom script that basically played the worm game and changed colors when the host system changed so we knew when it had actually made the switch)

Words cannot describe watching a multi-gigabyte installation of a server migrate to another physical box and keep working with less than 5 seconds of down time over the course of 12-15 minutes.  I am guilty of not having checked the total used size of the data drive, so I do not know how large the transfer was).  now to have this option in a freeware app that I can run on my Quad-core at home is very cool.  Especially since VirtualBox is currently my VM-app of choice.  Don’t get me wrong, I do/have used Virtual PC from Microsoft quite a good bit, but the configuration options and multiple VHD file format compatibility make VirtualBox the winner in that contest hands down.  Also, I have nothing against VMWare personally; however it is intensely confusing to go from Virtual PC to a VMWare workstation application and figure out what is going on and how to set it up without going back to “what already works… and is simple to use.”   Press release for VirtualBox 3.1

ok, after over 550 words, lets move on to the second half of my post (definitely not going to be a quick post… but then I always have a lot to say about stuff…)

OS and Web Browser share reports… Windows XP and Vista and MAC OS X are down, Win7 and Linux are up.  Firefox and IE8 usage are up, IE6 and IE7 are down, and everybody else, well no comment was made… original article is here on ZDNet - FYI how/where this info came from is sited on the ZDNet page.

right few comments about the above, first interesting how Firefox #’s are combined for all versions, does that mean Mozilla does a better job getting people to upgrade? or that Firefox users are less likely to fall very far behind on versions? same thing goes for the Safari #’s. yes Safari and Chrome are mentioned in the #’s, but no comments were made as to their rise or fall.

(completely unrelated, but I am listening to Pandora right now on my Sprint HTC Touch and they just played “Coloured Rain” by Slade, whom I have never heard before, at least not knowingly.  They are a British Rock band from the 70’s and I could have sworn it was The Beatles when it started playing…) (a note on that note, I Bing’d “wikipedia the beatles” and on the first page I got the Wikipedia page on the Beatles in the following languages, but not English… in order: sco, simple, nl, fr, ro, it.  I know what all of those are, except ro (Russian? it doesn’t look Russian)…  there were other results, including 2 Beatles albums’ pages on Wikipedia in English…)

More from Finndo

• couple of updates to the site…
• bringing the past to the future….
• continuing on in June/July 2009…