What;s the point in plugging monitor in the UPS? Or is it plugged into special "bypass" output just for regulating the voltage?
Not sure, I have most of my electronics plugged into it. I suppose I just needed a place to put the plug.
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Nice wiring, Jeff!
I talked to the building manager a few years ago and he said the people who built this condo skimped on a few things. Such as it being really hot in the summer, but freezing cold in the winter. With the winter stuff, it's almost as if the insulation isn't properly installed or something.
This post has been edited by Jeff: 01 August 2012 - 05:52 PM
EmericaSkater, on 02 August 2012 - 01:24 AM, said:
Looks like "Lieutenant" Pike is no longer working with UC Davis. If I may quote Robin Hood: Men in Tights, "Good riddance to bad rubbish."
Speaking as a UC Davis alumnus and long time Davis resident, the frustrating thing is that it was only one incident that happened eight months ago, but apparently it's the only thing that our town will ever be known for.
Might be cold consolation, but at least it spawned a funny (if only transient) meme. I don't think anybody's been laughing over at Penn State for at least a year.
It appears that my issue yesterday with the monitor is resolved. Just need to buy a new AC power adapter. The one that came with the monitor must have blown or something.
Damn my old-ass PC. Today the perfect storm hit. First, after finally getting Portal 2 to work (Thanks _Fungus_ / RoyBatty!) I was playing it and my computer choked and shut off. I turned it back on to find during the Windows XP boot process when the mouse cursor normally appears, it was moving off the top of the screen in a flash and the screen remained black. I loaded a Linux live CD to find when it tried a display mode higher than the BIOS, it was corrupted. I opened my case and felt that my graphics card was overheating. I took it out and spent a good 15 minutes cleaning the dust out of the fan and heat sinks, put it back in, turned it on, made sure the fan was spinning, and let it boot. I saw the blue XP startup screen and thought all was better. I did something else in the meantime for the computer to boot.
I get back downstairs and I'm seeing the BIOS tell me "Missing operating system". Something must have made it restart and fuck up the OS hard drive. I run my Linux live CD again and it is unable to mount that drive, NTFS lock. Seeing as I can't actually boot the thing, I am so fed up with all the trouble I've had and decide to look into introducing my fine 2005 Pentium 4 to Windows 7. Later, I put the installation disc in, just to see if the fact that it is Windows-based would unlock the drive. I open a command prompt from the recovery console and it can't make any progress. At this point the drive looks more corrupted than it had ever been previously. I was tempted to push forward with the W7 install, reformatting the whole drive, but I remembered that even though there is no irreplacable data on the drive, there is stuff I would be better without wasting the time on, such as my font collection, a minority of Steam data, and not having to deal with a fresh operating system.
So, I unleash RIPLinuX, do a deep scan, and restore the partition. The MFT and bootloader got scrambled somehow, so I restore/repair them too. At this point, the drive in its state locks up the BIOS' boot process completely, before it can even enter setup or load from the disc drive. When I unplug it, the process works fine, but that is no use, so I'm stuck. This drive has had problems before, including around two years ago when it lost its shit with the bootloader and required me to use the Windows XP Recovery Console from a CD to restore it about every other boot, then two months later mysteriously fragmented the Windows installation so that a number of services and tray icons did not load and were invisible (among other things, I have forgotten specifics), prompting my first reinstall. With this in mind, it would be best to decommission the drive. I am extremely frustrated that this would happen now, right when I am on vacation, playing my Steam games, and with the best opportunity to work on my projects. Mainly, I want to do this:
If I could load a CD to fix the bootloader, then from what I gather I could resume business as usual. I guess I could try tinkering to see if there is any way to progress with it plugged in. The most feasible option could be buying an enclosure, copying whatever actual data I would like to save, then blasting it away and using Windows 7. I don't know. I am very tired after spending lots of time last night dealing with the slow PATA and USB 2.0 transfers between hard drives to fix my Steam games, only to have this happen and cause me to spend more time running RIPLinuX, preparing Windows 7, and WTFing.
I remember my previous computer had all sorts of crashing issues. The whole thing would hard freeze every 3 hours or so. Only way to fix it would be to hold the power button and restart the system. Keyboard and mouse were completely locked up. Turns out it was my motherboard. Replaced that, and I never had an issue with it since.
I find with hard drives it is better to back them up and throw them in the bin (after being sure nothing is recoverable anymore) at the first sign of trouble, I speak from experience and I had to learn this the hard way.
That's sometimes the best way to go, yes, but there are a number of situations where that would just be a waste of a drive. Hendricks' computer is going on 10 years old... this opens the door to IDE controller chipset failures, cable failures due to 10 years of flex, HD failure that is electrical rather than mechanical (resolved by swapping out the drive's PCB), etc. There are many possibilities.
Back up in your ass with the Resurrection is the group harder than an erection that shows more affection. They wanna ban us on Capital Hill, cause its die muthafuckas, die muthafuckas still! - 20th century poet Willie D
I love computers, but I hate hardware.
This post has been edited by Captain Awesome: 03 August 2012 - 02:06 PM
I bought a combined SATA/IDE (PATA) enclosure that supports USB 2.0 and eSATA. I set it up, and thankfully all my data appears OK at first glance. Actually getting the thing to boot remains fruitless. Even when I booted the Windows 7 recovery console (I use the Windows Vista/7 bootloader instead of XP's) with it connected via USB and forcefully repaired the bootsector and MBR with "bootsect /nt60 F: /force /mbr" and "bootrec /FixMBR", the boot process still hangs with it plugged into the motherboard. The next step is for me to back up all the data.
Big thanks to TerminX who will be sending me a replacement drive in the mail. I should receive it next week or soon afterwards, but for the time being I will be away from IRC and Steam.
In theory I could try a complete wipe and repartition of the drive followed by a reinstall. I likely will repartition it anyway and use it as a not-so-portable USB disk, but I won't trust any data on it, transfers and synchronized folders only.
Out of all the things to not show live, NBC has decided to not show the men's 100m final...seriously? USAIN MUTHER FUCKING BOLT! That is just stupid on their part. The race is 10 seconds long, really, they couldn't find a way to work in 10 seconds at 4:50 ET? That is just maddening.
I have one - and ONLY one - Brokencyde song on my Mp3 player, just so when I'm at work I can occasionally remind myself of what it means to genuinely suffer.
EmericaSkater, on 05 August 2012 - 08:59 AM, said:
I have one - and ONLY one - Brokencyde song on my Mp3 player, just so when I'm at work I can occasionally remind myself of what it means to genuinely suffer.
Kind of been working on some high-res mods for Mass Effect 2. I'm no artist, so not sure how this will turn out. Kind of a work in progress. Helmet is a separate texture, which hasn't been touched.