wyred dot nu

I’ve been noticing in a few forums that some unscrupulous companies have been making fake threads to advertise their products/services.

I recently reported one such case to HWZ’s mods and the threads/user have been deleted.

Here’s what they did:

1) Scheming person creates an account user_A and makes a thread in a help forum stating he’s having problems with his harddisk and asks how to recover the data.

2) Other forum users come in with honest replies suggesting using techniques/software to recover the data.

3) Scheming person then creates an account user_B and makes a reply in that thread some time later, proceeds to mention a company name that provides such recovery services and how it has helped them.

I don’t know if a lot of forum moderators have noticed this already. At first, it’s hard to tell or notice this sort of thing. But once you’ve gotten the hang of it, you can easily tell which users are doing this.

Key points to watch: post count, previous posts he’s made (you can usually tell from here whether he’s an honest user), difference between the account registration date of both user_A and user_B.

These fuckers waste the time of honest users who make effort to provide help.

My current gaming computer is:

This rig is about 2~3 years old and I think I’m going to upgrade. Before, I’ve been avoiding upgrades because of my harddisk setup. RAID 0. In simple terms, it’s 2 harddisks working together as 1. The risk is also doubled. If 1 harddisk fails, data on both harddisks are as good as gone.

But I’m lucky as my harddisks have been running fine and non-stop(well, at least 90% uptime) ever since I bought them.

The biggest hassle is backing up files and restoring them on the new rig. But with less FFXI addiction now, I have more free time.

Things I’m going to upgrade:

But first, research must be done!

Update:

Here’s what I’ve chosen:

Total: SGD$1921 – Which is within my budget.

Decided not to go for SLI.

If I sell my old parts, I think I can get back $300~400.

I was experiencing weird internet problems. I’m on ADSL. My DSL signal would drop and try to reconnect. It was so frustrating because I can’t have a good game of FFXI. I got my entire PT killed when I DCed during a pull in a BC.

But I think I may have discovered the problem. And I’m a little embarassed about it because I was so sure that wasn’t the cause.

The fucking phones in my living room. They were probably faulty or maybe just the phone lines.

I’m guessing they are generating static onto the lines which affects my DSL stability.

As to how I discovered it, here’s the story.

One night, during one of those frustrating constant disconnecting sessions, I went to the living room and picked up the phone. I could hear static noise. And by holding the receiver for a while, it would gradually go away.

Then I noticed my DSL going back stable.

I tried it the next morning and wallah, it went worked again.

After work, I went to buy 2 new phones and some phone wires to replace the ones in my living room.

Till now, I haven’t seen that problem anymore. I really hope I fixed it. Because it has been irritating me for almost 6 months.

As to why I denied the phones to be the cause, I have tried connecting my modem directly to the wall and it didn’t work. I think static was still there on the phone lines and it didn’t go away easily.

Also, I don’t use phones at home. If my friends want to contact me, they would call my handphone directly. Only my mum uses the phones at home to chat with her friends.

Just need a few more days to confirm that the problem has been solved. *crosses fingers*