Archive for the ‘Windows’ Category

PC question

An idle thought: anyone ever heard of problems caused by a hard drive that was on the same IDE chain as the primary hard drive, but not connected to a power supply?

I replaced my PC’s old clicky 30 GB Maxtor hard drive (from my IBM desktop circa 2001) with a new Western Digital 160 GB 7200 rpm hard drive on Sunday, and also added an extra 1 GB (2 x 512 MB) of RAM. After that, I would periodically have complete freezes of the OS. Today they’ve been especially pernicious, sometimes not letting Windows make it past the boot screen.

I tried running a RAM diagnostic on the memory but after 6 passes it found no errors, so I figured that wasn’t the culprit. Just to be sure, I completely took out the new RAM (still froze up) and then put back in the new and removed the old (still froze up). So I figured, well, heck, it’s probably been about a year and a half since I installed Windows on this thing. Time for a refresh.

Rebooted, started the XP reinstall process, deleted my old partition, added a new one, formatted it, aaaaand… froze up copying Windows files to the hard drive. So that got me thinking. My IDE chain setup was as follows:

It’s currently three or four steps into the install process, so there’s no saying it won’t freeze up again, but I was wondering: has anyone ever heard of a PC having problems due to an unpowered hard drive on the IDE chain?

October 23rd, 2007 · Tags Annoyances, Computers, Lazyweb, WTF?, Windows | Comments Off

A short guide to blaspheming: running Boot Camp after replacing a MacBook’s hard drive

First, the background: a month or two ago, my MacBook’s hard drive had a minor liquid trauma and had to be replaced. I sent it to Apple to see if they’d replace it, but - as expected - it was accidental damage, not their fault, and so I had to pay $700 to replace the bottom casing, SATA cable, and hard drive (not an option right then, or now), or else have it sent back to me. I opted for the latter, and my MacBook returned to me… working?! Turns out someone in the know (as in, who can take it apart without completely FUBARing the laptop) needed to let it air out, apparently. I ran my MacBook for the next week straight… no difficulties. It seemed perfectly fine.

However, I was still a little leery… and had been itching to give myself more free hard drive space anyhow. I bought my laptop directly from a retail Apple Store, so I had no opportunity to go above and beyond the stock 80 GB hard drive that comes on the MacBook (well, the non-black ones, anyway). So, some research and a few purchases later, I followed these instructions (which have one small caveat, which I will mention after the jump) and replaced my hard drive with little to no difficulty (other than having to go out to Home Depot to buy a Torx T9 screwdriver), ending up with 150 GB internal hard drive and an 80 GB hard drive that could theoretically be used for backup.

The difficulty, however, arose when I tried to use Boot Camp to install a Windows partition. Read the rest of this entry »

July 30th, 2007 · Tags Apple, Computers, Mac, Windows | Comments Off

Enter the Hall of Monitors… IF YOU DARE

Ever wonder what happens if you plug the video out on your computer’s video card to the video in on your computer’s video capture card?

WONDER NO MORE!

I don’t know what I’d do if it wasn’t for the Internet doing all the things I’d never have thought to do first.

May 3rd, 2007 · Tags Hardware, Video, WTF?, Windows, YouTube | Comments Off

MSDN hates Clippy, too

Just in case this is a practical joke and someone changes it, I have to share this screenshot of Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2005 Developer Center homepage (click to see at full size):

10 Years of Visual Studio: Celebrating a decade of enabling you to create great software without Clippy trying to help you

April 5th, 2007 · Tags Windows, lol | Comments Off

Links galore

  • Mr. Gosling, why did you make URL equals suck?! A useful warning to Java developers - using URL.equals may be considered harmful, because apparently it does a blocking lookup to the IP address of the machine.
  • No Shredder in TMNT? Peter Laird, series creator of our favorite heroes on a halfshell, suggested the change. The villain is now a more generic ‘monsters and space aliens.’ Maybe it’s this guy, even though he didn’t really come from outer space, per se?
  • The world’s most indispensable Firefox tab: Ctrl-Shift-T (or Cmd-Shift-T on the Mac) will re-open the most recently closed tab. Hallelujah!
  • Slain trees haunt loggers. My coworker’s response: “heh, ent ghosts.”
  • Find out your Windows Vista Experience number. Sort of like a compatibility rating between your computer and Vista - is it love at first byte, or is Vista simply too high-maintenance for a down-to-earth machine like yours? (Pardon the pun - I had to.)
  • O’Reilly Media launched Hackszine.com, an online companion to the Hacks series of books gracing bookshelves for quite a while now. This is already in my RSS reader.
  • MAKE Blog: Do it yourself grassroots media sites using NewsCloud. Twenty bucks a month gets you a Debian install and NewsCloud; I think they handle hosting. Or you can just do it yourself, it’s open-source.
  • Dear God, it’s the Woot-Off that won’t die. The offer as I type this: a 37″ Sova widescreen HD-ready LCD monitor for $649.99 plus $5 shipping. I wish I could afford this monster.

That about covers it. I’m sort of like a bargain basement Weekend Update. (Obvious pop-culture references linked for my friend Sandra’s sake, who recently revealed she has no idea what movie features the songs “Danger Zone,” “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feeling,” and more. Or, for that matter, has never seen SNL.)

February 1st, 2007 · Tags Computers, Development, Gadgets, Internet, Microsoft, News, Science, Shopping, Software, TV, Technology, WTF?, Windows, lol | Comments Off

For once, I’m glad I can’t read Japanese

And you should be too.

What the

(photo tipoff by jtzapp)

January 27th, 2007 · Tags Apple, Mac, Microsoft, WTF?, Windows, lol | Comments Off