At least found some time to post an update.
I’ve decided to make some of my work public
I have some files uploaded to the server, they can be found here.
Some tech news:
Replaced damaged fan in my PC.
I will be going to Poland to get that Blu-ray. I tried emailing one eshop, but got no reply. I planned to visit Poland this year anyway.
I really need to remind myself to post here more often.
Haven’t posted here for a while.
So here’s some news.
It seems that our country does not know what Bluray is because BD-RE drives are still sold for 600-700$. I found some Pioneer BD-RE drives for a more realistic price, ~200$
The problem is that I have to buy them from Poland. Our country is not too far away so shipping should not cost much.
Currently this upgrade is just in the planning state.
Will post an update when there are more news available.
Not much to say this time.
Got some extra money, so planning to buy some new hardware.
Will probably buy a Bluray burner and (I haven’t decided yet) a scanner or a printer.
P.S.: I need to remember to post here more often, but I forget anyway. I need to remember not to forget to remember to post here more often !
At last received my USB to IDE+SATA cable back, but still have no PSU for it. The shop gave me a 50% discount because of missing power supply.
So I still have to use that 13 year old Delta 100W PC supply to power my drives
Hooked up the cable to an old LiteOn CDRW and it worked like a charm, too bad the speed was reduced to USB 1.1 (due to crappy usb hub unable to operate at 2.0 speed with low speed devices connected). I will use that CDRW to play my MP3 CDs on my VPC without having to got to my main PC every time I want to insert a new CD. Too bad my music player with USB port does not know how to read ISO9660 or UDF.
Also, found the OEM of that adapter cable: it is JMicron JM20337. Not much info about it, except that it is known to cause data corruption in SATA mode under *x OSes.
P.S.: I need to remember to post here more often.
Haven’t noticed that, but it seems that our email provider (hotmail) now has free SMTP and POP3 available.
Thanks to that, we can get emails quicker, without having to go to live mail website.
Now text-only mails work fine too, and no ads or links are added to them.
Along with free MX, Hotmail has become a great service, much better than the crappy webspace.de one we were using.
Ok, now the Update part. I bought a new DVD burner, to replace a DVD/CD-RW combo drive (which is already 5 years old), new drive works well.
The IDE-SATA HDD to USB cable (package with everything that was it it) was returned to the shop for a replacement. Haven’t got a reply yet, I hope it arrives in 1-2 days.
I don’t think I will use the included PSU much, because most of those cheap ass supplies bundled with connectors are crappy. They do work (for a while), but I want them not to only work, but to work reliably (eg. to not smoke or explode after just a few uses) and cause no damage do the drives they are powering.
I have an old (circa. 1996) 100W supply that works well powering the HDDs I used with this connector. But it’s too big to carry around just to power a single drive.
Ok, that’s all for today.
Bought a connector to convert internal harddrives to external. Tested it with 4 untested old hard disks (2x 1.2GB Quantums, 1x 6.48GB Fujitsu, 1×3.2GB Seagate Medalist).
Fujitsu drive was totally dead, Both Quantums worked but one was loud as hell and other had bad sectors. The only more or less useful drive was Seagate. Filled it with MP3 files and connected to a music player (which has USB port) to use as a storage for MP3 files.
The bad thing is that someone has opened the box where the IDE to USB connector was before I received it, because there was a cord to connect PSU to a wall socket, but the PSU itself was missing (I called the shop where I ordered the IDE2USB cable and they told me to return the box for a replacement). Had to power the harddrives using an old 100W Delta PSU.
The cable seems to work with CD/DVD drives too (at least my old LG DVD/CDRW drive worked with jumper set to Slave) although manual that came with the cable does not mention CD/DVD drive support.
I will probably buy a cheap internal DVD drive (I often have to reinstall OS for someone and it is burned onto a DVD and not all of PC I service have an DVD drive, but most newer PCs should be able to boot from USB, unless PC is a dinosaur or some laptop with no boot through USB) to use as external drive.
OK, I see that I’m making a long story out of this post, so that’s all for now.
I’ve had an unused old Pentium 4 processor salvaged from a dead motherboard (bad capacitors) for a while. The processor was the only useful part of that dead system.
I have no socket 478 board to test the processor. I’ve found one board which would work with my old Pentium 4 CPU. This board also has DDR2, so I have 1GB RAM for it (removed from my PC, replaced by 2x2GB modules), PCI-EX slot and onboard video (so videocard not required). That would be a nice office system to replace the uber-old Celeron 600mhz based PC (That will most likely be converted to a small server).
However, I can’t buy any hardware until I know that the CPU is not trash (bad capacitors on motherboards often kill CPU). I hope it is not. It’s old, but it is more than enough for office PC.
I will probably find a board to test that CPU, wait for more blog updates.
OK, enough for now.
Well, at least I found some time to update my blog.
Installed Win 7 beta to my old secondary PC (Athlon 2.1G, 1GB ram, Radeon 9550 agp) and it runs fine, not as fast as XP, but fine. I like it. Has all features found in Vista (even more, there’s dx11, too bad I can’t use it), but uses less memory and runs great even on my older secondary PC.
But the video started misbehaving when I tried to play 3d games today. It’s strange because these games worked fine on Win 7 when I last played them.
I hope this is not hardware related. I don’t want to spend any more money for upgrading that old PC.
I don’t want to make a long story out of this post, so that’s all for now.
Ok, our email service is now “one way”. SMTP dead (got to work once, but it seems to either not respond at all or do it REALLY slow, like if it’s overloaded), POP3 seems okay (but VERY slow to respond too). So we can only receive and can not send.
Created a .co.cc free domain, ddscentral.co.cc, added email using hotmail MX server.
It seems that webspace.de servers are crappy as an email solution.
Our new email address looks the same except .co.cc instead of .net.tc.
P.S.: I got a legit notification about winning something on some website. Checked the site, found out that the mail was most likely legit. It requested some of my contact info (eg. nickname, email). Tried to reply with that info but it seems that webspace smtp refused to work so my mail did not arrive on time.
I think I’ve had enough of their crappy email service.
I’m going to switch to out .co.cc email which uses hotmail MX servers. It does not have SMTP but I do not have to worry that emails I try to send will not be sent.
P.S.: Win7 beta still offline.
Ok, I might have to stay online for the whole night tonight because of the following:
MS released a public beta for Windows 7.
But due to server overloads, Beta is offline.
I migh have to stay online for the whole night to get the beta key.
Can’t wait to try out the new Windows. I wonder if it’s possible to get 2 working keys… (I need one copy for VMWare and maybe one to run directly on hardware).
Maybe will post an update tomorrow if there are any news.