19 Apr 10 Cool Hard Drive

A few days ago, I purchased a new, twin, BlackX Sata Hard Drive docking station.

They’re really useful.

I didn’t want to get an external drive in a case, because I’d stripped down some computers, and had these perfectly working Sata drives from them. I was looking to buy a standard enclosure, but then I’d really need to buy one for the drives that I had, which would work out at over a hundred bucks, assuming that each enclosure was around $25 – $30.

BlackX Hard Drive Dock and Drives Then I saw the BlacX. The single slot USB version was on sale for $34.99, and I would only need to buy one. I went ahead and I’ve been happy with its performance. I can hot-swap hard drives from the dock (assuming you’re not in the middle of writing data of course).

Now, I can have a hard drive for video, one for music, one for documents and so on.

So, when I needed to upgrade my music library drive, as my old 500GB one was rapidly filling up (I’ve digitized, and bought digital music for some years now), I decided to go for a similar solution.

This time I purchased a twin slot dock, that will work with both USB and eSATA connections. I don’t as yet have any computers with eSATA but I almost certainly will on the next upgrade. The only thing you need to watch for when using eSATA, is that your computer is equipped with a Port Multiplier or your system will only see one drive and not two.

There is no such restriction with USB.

I also bought a 1TB Western Digital ‘Green’ Drive. It’s supposed to use less energy and more to the point, it was over $20 cheaper that the ‘regular’ ones.

It seems to work fine, and is speedy enough too.

One thing I did notice though. The two older Western Digital drives that I have in the twin dock (they’re both 320GB each), are too hot to touch for long. The new 1TB Green Drive, is quite cool in comparison, and I could put my hand on it, and leave it there.

I would assume that this could help the drive electronics to last longer, as heat is certainly no friend of such equipment.

All in all though, I’m pleased with the purchase. A twin dock with 1TB drive for $130, with plenty of room for expansion in the future.

Tags: 1tb, digital music, drive electronics, esata, hard drive, hard drives, multiplier, music library, western digital

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02 Aug 08 Usenet? What’s That?

I used usenet before I had an internet account.

My first PC – 640 RAM, DOS 3.3, 12 VGA (256 color 640 x 480), 30MB hard drive, which cost me £1,250 ($2,500) – was fine with email, and news. That was back in 1986. IRC worked on it too when it came along.

It came with a set of disks labelled Windows 1.0. I put them in and played with them, but it didn’t do anything I couldn’t do in DOS, and it was a heck of a lot slower at it. I put them in a draw and didn’t bother with them again.

I didn’t want some fancy GUI messing up my nice tidy organized hard drive, where I had every application in a separate folder, exactly where I chose to put it.

Anyway, I digress. I had a lot of fun in Usenet. Nothing untoward, there were no binaries then, and when they first appeared it seemed such a hassle to download (I had to suffer dial-up all the way down to early 2000).

Someone did send me a naughty picture once – and it took 40, yes forty, minutes, to get this GIF file over a 1200bps modem.I wasn’t impressed. There weren’t any mp3s about then, most all of the software I used was shareware, and anyway, my telephone bills were so high – as I had to pay for every single minute I was online, that I didn’t have any spare cash to buy anything else anyway.

I finally relented in 1994 and upgraded to a second-hand 386SX machine with 8MB RAM, and an 85MB HD. I thought I was in a Ferrari at the time. It cost me £400 ($800). I did this so I could run Windows. Why did I want to run Windows? So I could see what all this Graphical stuff was all about called The World Wide Web.

It wasn’t up to much. There wasn’t much on it. Some educational stuff, and a few corporations with a single page. Nothing to buy then of course. No Music on there, no sites for naughty boys (or girls) to ogle at.

So for the most part, I was back in DOS, back in IRC, and back in Usenet. The thing is too, back in those days when I had to pay for EVERY minute online, I could log into the NNTP server, download the news, then grab my email too, and go offline again, read all the mail and news, and then dial-in and send it. You very much felt part of a community, even though it was in real time. It was still exciting that you got connected with people all over the world, and might even get a reply back from them the very same evening! Magic!

I switched to the local cable company, and they offered dial-up phone service too, with FREE local calls. That was unheard of in the UK, even though it was pretty much standard practice in the US. Now, I could stay online all the time if I wanted. Except for one thing. Other people in the house wanted to use the darn phone line to… make phone calls.

I got a second line put in, that cost more in line rental than my Internet account did.

Then my internet provider gave us web space. 5MB. Wow! What can we do with that?

I was on my way on the web, and my usenet use started to give way to web use instead. That would have been around 1996.

As I mentioned before, I got broadband in early 2000, and I’ve never really looked back from there.

Usenet? I still use it. I have one or two uk.local groups I still post in from time to time. I’ve never met any of the people in the newgroups that I post in, even though I’ve seen some of their names for more than 15 years now.

I don’t really care what they look like. It’s the conversation that counts. The banter that goes back and forth. I don’t need to know where they live, or their birthday, or their job, or anything else. If they say something that catches my attention, I respond, and vice versa. That’s it. That was the fun with Usenet. Log in, download the news, read, reply. It was the social media network of the 80′s and 90′s.

Would I want to turn the clock back? No. Not really.

Life online was simpler then, and it was more pleasant without the idiotic spammers. But, I’m enjoying all the stuff I can do now online. I like that I can download music and movies. I’ve always disliked crowds, and waiting in line for more than a few minutes, so shopping is something to be endured in my book, and not enjoyed. I enjoy shopping online though. I can take as long as I want to research stuff, and pick the best price from a whole load of outlets most of the time. It makes me a living too.

I don’t think Usenet is dead yet, but perhps it’s seen its best days. I think that IRC is on the same road too. Many folks these days haven’t even heard of Usenet, and IRC, so perhaps they’ll end up going back to the kind of role they played when they first started out – for the geeks.

Now that could be something to look forward to!

Tags: binaries, corporations, dos 3, email, fancy gui, ferrari, forty minutes, gif file, hard drive, hassle, hd, heck, internet account, irc, modem, mp3s, naughty boys, nntp server, vga, world wide web

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24 May 08 Computers, Who’d Have Them?

Computers are like cars.

A quick job almost always ends up taking hours, and something that you think will be a simple, inexpensive quick fix, entails buying half a new machine.

Well, perhaps not quite, but it often seems the case.

Anyway, I’ve been canniba lizing some of the many old boxes I had laying around here.

Kathy had been complaining about her computer for some time. Ok, it really was slow, and I think I’d have been issuing death threats to it as well by now. A combination of it being only a Celeron CPU (one of those cheap make pretend processors), and PWD (Progressive Windows Disease) saw to that.

What’s Progressive Windows Disease?

Oh, every machine running Windows gets it, sooner or later, particularly, if you make regular use of the system.

WIndows is lousy at memory management, and lousy at keeping its registry (the master index if you like) in order. The former is what slows done your machine after you’ve open and closed a dozen programs in one session (as Windows doesn’t always free up all the memory for other programs), and the latter means that your computer’s hard drive ends up thrashing about looking for stuff, because Windows itself can’t remember where it’s stored it. That’s on top of all the other stuff like possibly getting spyware in your machine, or you’ve not defragged the drives in a while (neither of which Linux machines suffer from).

The only real cure, is to back up your data files, reformat the drive, and using the WIndows CD, that you got with your machine, re-install everything from scratch. The Windows installation takes anything from 30-40 minutes usually, but it can take a few days, to get everything you had back just as you like it (and that settings wizzard thing is, in my experience, another pile of junk).

Anyway, readers, I’ve digressed from telling you about my little project to descending into a rant about Microsoft’s OS. I’m sorry, but it’s oh, so easy, to rant about rubbish.

Back to the project.

I had an old Dell machine with an Intel P4 in it, and 512MB RAM, and an 80GB HD, along with a DVD R/W. I plugged it in. It was as dead a dodo. I had another old Dell, with a Celeron and 256MB RAM next to it, so I swapped out the power supply, and lo! one working machine.

Now, I don’t have any Windows CDs for these Dells, so I couldn’t do what I really wanted to do, and reformat the whole thing. I did what I could. I removed all the old software that had been installed by the previous owner. I cleaned in the registry, defragged the drive, installed up to date Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware software, installed all the Windows updates I could find, removed the desktop links to that nasty vile Internet Explorer, and installed, and set as default a real web browser – FIrefox.

I set up Kathy’s Gmail, and Remember The Milk Accounts (we don’t use local email clients anymore). I also removed Ms Office, and installed OpenOffice instead. Yes it was a legally installed copy of MS Office, but I particularly do not want it on something with only a P4 CPU, as it’ll make the machine run like watching paint dry.

I installed additional hardware, such as printer, and scanner, and wireless network card. I installed the drivers for that, and set up the network. I took the TV card from the slow Celeron, and put that in this box too, and installed the hardware. I installed Joost, which is rather good for online TV. Finally took the memory from the old Celeron box (two 512MB sticks), and put those into this P4 Box, giving it 1GB instead of 512MB.

She’s happy with it so far.

Meanwhile, I took the old Celeron, and as I did have a Windows OEM CD for that, reinstalled the OS. I’m now using that myself purely as a communications machine – for Skype, IM, Magic Jack, IRC etc. I did find antother 512MB Stick of RAM, and so, as it only has 2 memory slots, I was able to put in 256+512, giving 768K in total, which is about the real absolute minimum I’d want to run an XP box with.

I think that putting the comms in the house onto a seperate box is a good idea as it frees up resources. WE have all our telephone communications through the computers here (Skype and Magic Jack) having kicked the overpriced BellSouth – now AT&T – into touch a few years ago). A set of headphones means I can have comfortable hands free phone conversations when I am working, and the Magic Jack connects to the standard cordless phone system in the house and gives us free calls throughout North America for $20 a year.