Naked Gary is a Geek!

Well, the power outage the other night fried half of the memory in my computer. After I got it open I saw that I had two 128MB DIMMs. It only beeped at me and wouldn't even go into the bios startup. The fan on the video card was sounding like a bearing was going, so I initially assumed that that was the problem. I went into town and bought a new one to replace it. That was nice and fixed that problem, but the computer still died on startup.

So I did the nerd thing and googled the name of my motherboard using one of my other computers. Google sure is smart. Its first entry was the manual for the motherboard at Intel. It only had a couple of troubleshooting entries, and the first was a 'faulty memory beep'. Since I had two memory DIMMs, I swapped them and then tried them separately. Sure enough one was bad. Well, I ordered three 512MB DIMMs with second day delivery to upgrade to a full 1.5GB on the day after tomorrow when they come, and I am limping along with Alzheimer computer until then. I'll use the one good 256MB DIMM to add to the other even more obsolete computer. I would have gone with 1GB ones, but my system is just obsolete enough that I couldn't find any that would work. The manual for the motherboard claims that it was designed for them, but that none have ever been tested with it. I took the safer route and stuck with the 512s.

Guess I'll purchase a couple of UPS's as my granddaughter has been razzing me to do. With 4 computers, the cable modem, the router, the network storage unit, and the WAP system, I'll need two to avoid running massive extension cords to the stations across the room. With the hour battery support and power filtering, my systems will be lots safer. At least I'll hope so. Costco has a UPS for $99 that looks like it will do.

Anyway I hadn't realized how dependent on my computer I was until it wasn't available and I had to figure out how to get the software I'm dependent on running on one of the spare computers. I've had the network storage unit with 250MB USB HD and a second for automatic backup for sometime now. I store all my data over there. It was sure neat being able to run the applications that are installed over there on the other computer without doing anything special. I'll have to clean up all of my systems so that software isn't installed just all over the place.

Anyway, the failure also shows me how vulnerable I am. I popped a knoppix disk into the main computer and am using linux to copy the entire C: disk from the main computer that is limping along to the network storage unit. Then I'll burn it to a DVD before I start cleaning off all the stupid software that I never use on the WindowsXP system that broke. Linux gets around the brain dead Microsoft operating system that locks files preventing a systematic backup of the drive while it is running. That's the second stupidest thing that Windows does.

The first is the way everything is designed for a single threaded user. It annoys the heck out of me when applications lock everything up waiting when you could be doing something in another window. The worst is the combination when you go to a pdf file and adobe has to load for a couple minutes. You'd think that they could free the system up for other processes to be able to make use of the wasted time. Also when they decide to steal the focus away from the keyboard while you are typing. You don't know how many times I loose entire folders that are accidentally moved by stray mouse clicks and focus shifts. Their process management system is so nieve that the memory for the tasks that are available on the screen are usually the pages that are swapped out. You'd think that they could have done a simple priority system keeping the ones that the user would most likely need readily available. Linux always runs so much smoother during swapping. The expanded memory will help in that area some, but with the massive databases that I play with and the huge number of applications that I keep open all the time, it won't seem much different. I'll just be able to keep 50 more tabs open in each of the browsers that I'm using.

Well, that's enough for now. I could go on and on all day. Until next time, have a good day.

Nude Gary