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''Those cursed for all eternity shall receive bad sectors on their hard disks'' ~ Anonymous hi-tech god Remember that new disk I bought just last weekend to stand in for my broken Raptor disk? Log Name:      SystemSource:        ...

One of the features boasted about Windows Vista is how visually responsive it remains despite being placed under load by simultaneous programs. Well, in the past month I have been battling with a Windows Vista that would occasionally freeze up, somethings even to the point of sticking the mouse pointer in its place. It would take around a minute ...

Electronic and computer hardware (well, except RAM) are always on a sloped trend when it comes to pricing. That is good for the consumer, falling prices make it more affordable to mainstream population who aren't lucky enough to win Big Sweep or Toto. This allows for more sales, and in effect, widespread adoption. But why do prices drop? Or put ...

I'll never truly understand pet owners. Raising pets are mightily expensive endeavours, in my perspective. Not only do you need to dish out the money to feed, groom, and maintain the pet's well being, all that factors in heck of a scary amount of devoted time. And here I am finding not enough time to even sleep to keep my job in check. But, it ...

Sweet loving. It is well past 3am. What am I still doing awake? Well I certainly ain't performing a variety of video tests on my newly acquired high-resolution monitors. What I have been doing is trying to get out of another technological mess I fell into. I had completely forgotten this workstation of mine was built on a really unstable ...

When I finally got around to clearing my surplus leave enbloc at the end of last year, I decided to reward myself for the past half year of swamping through treacherous terrain a.k.a. project work. By purchasing hardcore keyboard and mouse to give me that decisive edge in gaming, I had high hopes of boosting myself into uberness and leetness, ...

Note to self: when an ailing external hard disk exhibits signs of the end times, throw it away before its pessimism and depression affects the rest of the hardware. Lest a bad apple in the basket spoils all the good ones. That means detaching the USB cable connecting to the desktop computer. The power adapter of that external disk has shot ...

*shhhh* I am going to let you in on some secrets. Secrets on how to exploit some vulnerabilities in Windows Vista, thereby stalling the system, rendering in that frustrating despair of useleness. Sounds like fun, huh? Read on. Drag the taskbar around the screen. Yeap, it's that simple. Windows Vista occasionally trips and falls flat on its face ...

So I could finally get my new computer to reboot with ease, and to actually resize the video window during playback; I thought things could simply get better from now on. What a foolish thought that was, for not taking past trends to predict the future. One of the incredibly entertaining aspects of Indian movies is the imperial edict thou shalt ...

One of the activities I thoroughly enjoyed when studying computation mathematics in university was to explicitly penning down all possible combinations of values given a certain bit array length. Formulas are for wussies. Ok, I lied. But heck, that sure is more enjoyable of the chore of figuring which combination of BIOS settings work in a stable ...

Every parent knows those crushingly exciting and exhausting times. The family welcomes the cute little new member; a wonder bundle of pure joy. There is no greater satisfaction knowing there is the next generation who will carry on your good legacy + fallicies into the future. This joy includes spending many a subsequent night answering ...

There's an old saying, ''the more hardware you buy at the same time, the more likely something else will prevent them from working properly on Day One''. Ok, I made that up, but I am going to stick by it and make it an adage from now on. By no deliberate effort of my own. So today I decided to be a little spendthrift and shop around for a ...

I really believe technology is a great thing, bringing huge benefit to the world. But the pace of improvement and change is so rapid that, at least at the consumer market, manufacturers hardly consider designing their products for reliability and durability. Just take a look at this forum. What now? Like a sudden lightning strike that ...

Captain's Log, System date 4th of December Year 2006. It is 1:09AM. After transplanting an old IBM hard disk from the once-glorious-but-now-ready-for-scuttle flagship over to my latest machinery for verification, I have concluded (reluctantly) that the 40GB worth of data stored within is lost. Without warning, this Windows Dynamic disk ...

icelava:The nice thing about software is an OS reinstall can make it suddenly feel like a brand new machine all over. This carries absolutely no truth whatsoever when it is the hardware that is acting up. Now is the season for forest fires, haze, and then CPU fires. Why I say so, is due to the fact that my CPU fan would activate upon a threshold ...

The good news for my server is the harddisk cable appeared to have loosen somehow. So I peel off its skin, grabbed its internal intestines (aka SATA cable) and make a squeeze to force the server into painful submission and cooperation. Now stay that way. So what happens? The baton gets passed, again. This time my trusty old desktop enters the ...

Note to self: to ensure the most reliable write sessions to DVDs, always copy the desired data out of the disks attached to that generic IDE RAID card onto one attached to the motherboard's IDE controllers. That crummy cheapo card always fails at the best (or most demanding) moments, and almost guarantees coasters out of my DVDs.

I gave up trying to perform any more resuscitation rituals on my server. A Dell PowerEdge SC430 was delivered to my doorstep recently. After a minor setback on input device interfaces, and learning how to manoeuvre around the pretty impressive casing design that nearly doesn't require any screws, I finally have a new (real) server up and ...

This ghost continued to haunt me yet again just two days into my stay in USA. Knowing I would require the help of my family to reboot my server, I wrote my parents an email requesting for a hard reboot. After a few exchanges of emails just to describe how a button looks like, they finally mention it was ''done''. But, the remote connection still ...

Huh huh...... the disk in my server used to stored backups of my laptop's disk images has failed to hang on steady against the onslaught of data writes during the Acronis TrueImage backup session. Event Type:    Error Event Source:    atapi Event Category:    None Event ID:    9 ...