Category: Tech

Entries on technical stuff

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Finally bought an SSD

I’ve been wanting one for a long time. But the prices were too high at that time. Now that the Intel 320 series, 120GB SSD costs $315, I grabbed one quickly.

I’ve been on RAID 0 for a few years. Using 2 WD Raptors 36GB 10k RPM. Which gives me 72GB as my C drive.

After installing the OS, FFXI, I’m only left with a little bit of space for 1 or 2 more games. And games nowadays take up many gigs of space.

Which is why if I ever want to get an SSD, it will have to be at least 120GB. Back then, you’d need to pay SGD400~500 for such an SSD.

Right now, I’m restoring Windows 7 over the network. I bought an Ultimate edition because someone was selling it cheap. This edition allowed me to backup over the network to another computer which I have running 24/7.

Here’s a few things I learned today.

When I set my motherboard’s SATA ports to RAID mode, there was an extra long delay as the motherboard detects the drives at each bootup. Now that I’m on a single SSD, no reason to use RAID mode anymore. So I set my SATA ports to AHCI.

My DVD rom uses SATA, and I wasn’t able to boot up through it. This is when I learned that you need to set it to IDE mode if you want to access your SATA DVD rom drive outside of the OS.

So I finally got to boot up Windows 7 from the DVD. Selected repair, and after a few dialog boxes, I was able to access the shared folder on my other computer which contains my system image and backups.

Not sure if I missed out anything, when Windows 7 started up the network, it connected to my network in 100mbps mode and not 1gbps. Thus, the restoration process is taking a long time. :(

I bought a new PSU last night too. A CoolerMaster Silent Pro Gold 600W, for the 80+ Gold rating in efficieny. This is for my 24/7 computer in hopes of cutting down the electricity consumption.

Updates:

After the restoration was done, Windows 7 would crash on bootup if the SATA port is set to AHCI.

I set the SATA port to IDE and it booted up fine. Then googled around and found this fix:

1. Startup “Regedit
2. Open HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / SYSTEM / CurrentControlset / Services
3. Open msahci
4. In the right field left click on “start” and go to Modify
5. In the value Data field enter “0” and click “ok”
6. exit “Regedit”
7. Reboot Rig and enter BIOS (hold “Delete” key while Booting

Source

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The PC that wouldn’t shut down

Time for another spooky IT-related story.

A friend of mine decided to try the sleep button on her keyboard.

Something weird happened at this point which I could not remember, all I know is from this point on, her PC wouldn’t shut down after selecting the shutdown button on Windows 7.

It would shutdown and after 1-2 seconds, boot up again by itself. Only way to shut it down is to press and hold the power button, but no one should have to do this to shut down their computer.

I got her to install remote software for me to login and check her power settings. Everything seemed fine. Even tried resetting BIOS settings to factory defaults.

It just so happened that we were planning a lan party at another friend’s place so I got her to bring down her computer so I can check after the games.

Since there’s nothing else to try on Windows, and even resetting the BIOS didn’t help, I first tried reinstalling the OS.

Didn’t fix the problem.

By now, it’s already 7am and it’s starting to get bright outdoors and I’ve run out of ideas.

All I could do is stare at the motherboard.

My eyes looked around, admiring the circuit patterns and electronic components.

Then my gaze fell upon the motherboard’s CR2032 battery.

*takes out battery, set my alarm to ring in 15 minutes, nap*

*alarm rings, puts in battery, boots up computer*

Shutting down…

Shuts down…

Silence…

2 seconds passed….

5 seconds passed…

10 seconds passed…

Fixed!

Since the battery is used by motherboards to save configuration settings, my guess is the sleep signal on the keyboard triggered something on the motherboard, which by only taking out the battery, will force it to forget all settings.

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The case of the undeletable files

Recently came across a few spooky IT-related situations.

Let’s start with the story of my company’s NAS.

It’s a QNAP TS-201 with 2 150GB harddisks configured in mirror raid. When the disks have less than 10GB space, it will emit a beeping sound like every 10 minutes and I’ll have to clear it’s “Recycle Bin” to free up space.

When you delete files on a NAS, it gets deleted instantly unlike deleting files on your desktop where it goes to the recycle bin first.

So I sent in a request for some new 1TB drives to upgrade to. Spent my weekend upgrading it because that’s when no one needs access to it.

When Monday came, I got a report that excel was creating .tmp files when saving the document and they weren’t deleted when the excel file is closed. When I tried to delete the .tmp files manually, the files disappear but reappear when the page is refreshed.

Thinking it was an access issue, I SSH-ed in and set ownership to Guest, group to Everyone, chmod777 every file but it still didn’t work.

Then I decided to try SSH into our second NAS which is used only by my department. I compared the folder structure of both NASes and see that there’s a missing “Network Recycle Bin 1” folder on the upgraded NAS.

To fix this, I logged into the web administration panel of the NAS, went to the Network Recycle Bin page, the checkbox that enables this feature is already ticked, so all I did is just click the save button.

I checked the folder structure and see that the folder has been recreated.

Tried to delete a file and it worked.

Case solved.

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My first girlfriend

Since my polytechnic days, I’ve wanted to have my own laptop. But I never got around to buying it because I was too poor.

Then after I started working and could afford one, I didn’t buy because the laptops back then were heavy, bulky, slow, ugly and still expensive.

Fast forward a few more years, there’s a lot of good laptops now but because there’s so many choices, and it’s so much trouble to compare all of them, I gave up.

And at this time, I don’t know if I will make good use of it even if I have one. So I borrowed a laptop from work to use. I went to a StarBucks outlet, ordered coffee and went on to catch up on articles that I’ve accumulated through the people I follow on twitter and stored at Read-it-Later.

It proved to be a good experience. I could focus on my what I want to do and not get distracted by that silly MMORPG I’ve installed on my home computer. Most importantly, there’s air-con. It can be so warm at home I don’t feel like getting work done.

And now, after much research, I’ve decided to go with a Dell m301z. It costs SGD $1199 (USD $870).

  • It’s within my budget.
  • Acceptable screen resolution, touchpad design and keyboard layout.
  • Has bluetooth so I can tether to my iPhone and surf the net.
  • Has good battery life. Easily lasts me 2-3 hours.
  • A dual core 64bit CPU with virtualization support so I can try out MacOSX on a VirtualBox.
  • 4GB ram.

So far it’s working really great. Everything’s smooth despite not having a dedicated graphics board. I don’t need one because I don’t intend to game on this laptop.

I wanted a dual core 64bit CPU with 4GB ram because I know I’ll be running lots of apps as I do development work on my personal website projects.

It comes installed with Windows7 64bit Home Premium. And we all know Windows 7 is the best OS Microsoft has made since the 3.1 days.

Yesterday and today, I spent 2 hours at Burger King getting all the things I’ve wanted to do, done. I’ve organized and synchronized my browser bookmarks between 2 computers at home, 1 at work and this new laptop.

I’m also done setting up apache/mysql/php so I can start working on a new version of Tarutarutimes-Online.

Just 2 days and I know that my money has been well spent. I just love this laptop! I named it Kanojo (Girlfriend in Japanese) after the female character in Houkago Play. In the 4-square comic, she doesn’t have a name and is just referred to as “Kanojo”. Sort of like “The Girlfriend”.

KANOJO

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After almost 2 years exploring photography…

I strongly do not believe the saying that you don’t need a good camera/lens to take good photos.

Well, if you don’t care about the quality but just the composition, yes.

But in order to take photos with sharp quality, nice background blur, under various lighting conditions, you really need a good camera and lens. A good camera that will cost at least SG$3000 and lens at least SG$1000.

I may be wrong, but I would still stubbornly disagree until someone is able to convince me that I can take “National Geographic”-like photos with a Nikon D80 and cheap 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 VR lens.