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damn, I think I'm in love

ah, since Dozer posted his personal site, I might as well do the same. My under-maintained personal site - www.tc.umn.edu/~calv0016

I admittedly create many pages full of crap. I blame laziness, a lack of time, the ues of Dreamweaver, and my university. But since I do this for free, I better not hear any complaints. www.student.med.umn.edu/class2007

and what on earth do you need all that storage for? Is it all local?

My school is a major adult and pediatric bone marrow transplant center. In fact, the worlds first successful BMT occured here in 1968, and we now have the second-largest unrelated donor experience in the US. My class had one of the docs from the Dept of Medicine bring in his patient, who in...

Oh?

so it's Friday and I decided to once again do battle with my computer. I hooked up a floppy drive, and it didn't work - BIOS said bad floppy (after I enabled the floppy drive). Looking at the floppy port on the motherboard, it's missing 3 prongs, not the usual 1 that I see in other computers...

And that's why my first car was a Subaru (Impreza), and why my wife's first car was one as well (also an Impreza). While we don't do off roading, we do get large piles of snow thrown on the highway with some regularity here in Minnesota, and when we're unlucky it melts and freezes. AWD is great.

I had a motherboard a few years ago, and the same thing happened. IIRC it ways a Tyan board, surprizingly. I may not have had the board perfectly mounted in, however. Regardless, with an antistatic bag behind part of the board, it worked great. To this day I always wonder if I should...

I thought this belonged in this forum since it's a little more of an academic question than urgent. Anyway .... I'm wondering if there is clearly an optimal way to configure my system: MSI K8T Neo, A64 3000+, 512 MB DDR 400 DVD, CD-RW. NO FLOPPY (ug!) 2*9 GB Cheetah 18XL's 1*74 GB Raptor...

no offense taken. I'm frequently smarter than most average trees and rocks, but an NT installer is a stretch most days. I'm slowly getting used to having to out-think MS. :wink:

my privious post made no sense - sorry. Didn't SR show that most cache hits involve small files? If this is the case, I would think latency would be a big issue, which in this case wouldn't require the drive to go to a platter for data. The time savings between 150 MB/s vs. 300 MB/s might...

This suggestion makes perfect sense to me, yet it did not work. What was MS thinking???

rebooting...

ah, I see. I also realized that I have 2 SATA controllers on my board - a Via VT8237 which I was using before, and the Promise 20378. I switched the drive over to the Promise, hoping Windows would recognize the controller, but it didn't. I'm wondering if one would be preferable over the...

Thanks Doug, but the question is how do I tell Windows during setup to look some place other than the floppy drive (another HD, a USB drive, or my other CD-ROM)?

At this point I refuse. Plus, my floppy port is pretty well hidden behind the IDE cables and the hanging basket that holds my HD's.

I have one...but how do I tell the OS to look to another drive? The install routene seems dead set on looking for a floppy drive when I hit F6. If I could specify a CD-ROM, USB drive, anything I'd be set.

or better yet, how do I slipstream a driver or two in?

hmm...how do I do a network install? I've got other computers (with floppy drives!) on my network.

oh, I have other HD's in this machine, yet I can't install XP to the SATA HD while running another OS off a different HD. Anybody know a trick to get this thing to work. And here I thought I was living in the modern era. grrrr.

I want to install my new SATA HD. The SATA controller on my motherboard (MSI K8T Neo) requires 3rd party drivers, which is provided on a floppy. I don't have a floppy drive on this computer. Is there a way I can burn the drivers to CD? Grrr..... Would it help if I just bought a damn SATA card?

what options do we have for SATA drives these days?

because STR doesn't affect the performance of the vast majority of desktop computers.

Yup, good reason. Just today I was really wishing I had a dualie. I was downloading some videos and unzipping some large files. OS slowed down considerably, and for a minute I had to rethink what I posted previously. If I had the money (lots, to be exact) I'd be in dualie land. But I don't...

Is it me, or has SR flip-flopped (hate to use a term used recently by politicians) in recent years over this. IIRC, their latest thinking is that larger caches can make up for less than stellar seeks (why the 8 MB drives do so well). But then they claim the Raptors are so great, even compared...

I'm guessing your not talking about network I/O or hard drive I/O. For those I thought the slowest modern CPU's would be just fine. I think I remember reading about a fairly massive download site running on a meansly P-100 back in 1998 or so. Granted, it had a hell of a storage subsystem...

Alright already! Forget STR. Check. Got it. Roger that. But is there any meaninful difference between the older U2W-LVD standard and the newer U320 for desktop use? After looking at SR's TCQ data I'm fairly convinced that TCQ may be nearly worthless for me, but are there any other features...

Can anybody comment with authority (or at least informed opinion) on my lack of need for higher STR (which I pretty much believe already), or any of the newer SCSI features since the U2W-LVD standard?

hey crew, I'm thinking about getting a Atlas 15K drive in the near future. Is there any reason I should consider replacing my SCSI card - it's an Adaptec 3950 U2B (U2W-LVD, 80 MB/sec, dual channel card). I don't do much (anything?) that needs high STR as far as I know, and I don't know of any...

The other thing is that information while on the go is now a must for me. Back in my college days I wanted computing power at home, and could care less about power while at class. Today I'm at school for 5-14 hour stretches (and next year I'll be doing some 30-hour "shifts"), so I need to get...

I think I agree with everything you said. Back in the day I could overwork a single CPU, whereas a dualie would stay responsive. Today I have trouble making a single CPU get sluggish, though there are clearly ways people can and do. To answer your question, for me the single fast CPU +...

impressive results for the Atlas 10K V. I can't wait to see what the next Atlas 15K drive will do.

It's been a while, Adcadet. So, do you still prefer duallies or is a fast single CPU equal or better? Sorry about that. I'm guessing this is the question you're referring to. My observations are as follows: - Dual Celeron 300 MHz (BP6, baby!) from a P2-450 - I thought the dualie was faster by...

I'm pretty happy with my latest round of upgrades: - For my main machine in Novemberish I went with the K8T Neo with a 3000+ (A64), which was $200, now is a bit less ($150+) - For Christmas my wife and parents both went with an Athlon 2500+, and both work great.

I'm bracing for another fun filled year of dealing with very smart people who should either know better, don't have the time, or both. See my class webpage to see how I'm getting a bit insistant this year.

A $79 device from Logitech - clearly it's more powerful than the lasers they use for eye surgery. And those lasers have far vewer buttons and are only USB 1.1 compatible. No, this is a peripheral device and missile guidance system built into one.

does anybody have a sense of how it performs vs. regular 32 bit XP?

Not for me. I'd rather save my $100 (or $71, since I'm a student) and put it towards a new HD. Linux is much higher on my list of OS's to play with, plus I can get a nice distro for free.

I didn't even realize the 5400 RPM drive was an option on this laptop.

my sister-in-law is just starting college. My recommendation to her father, who took it line-by-line is as follows: Latitude D600 Pentium M 1.4 GHz with a 14.1" screen 512 MB RAM in 2 DIMMs (cheaper, and I doubt she'll ever upgrade it) no floppy (!) 60 GB hard drive 8-24-24-24X SWDVD/CDRW...

interesting....

could the card(s) on a laptop or desktop be switching modes to conserve power? I've occasinally had signal dips on my laptops, both at school and at home, and always suspected it was because it was dropping the power level to conserve energy. Why that would affect the signal strength (since I...

I wonder if the 16 MB cache will allow it to outperform the newer raptors. My guess is that it will for single user applications. But I'm better the NCQ will be useless for most people, although I can see some of the "enthusiasts" claiming how great it will be for when they run their que depth...

although the only way I can figure out how to use a specific codec is to rip to .wav then convert to MP3 using dbPowerAmp.

Of course!

hmm...did they drop support for .rm's in version 2?

is any of their software free?

I wish.

does anybody know a way of getting the audio track from a .rm and encoding it into an MP3 (or wave, for that matter)? I see that dbPowerAMp can do .rm to MP3, but it crashes on me every time I try, so I'm guessing it sees that I'm trying to convert a .rm video and not audio and gives up. It...