So, I've been running Window$7 RC since last summer, and it was running like a champ. A few days ago, I start getting this 'nagware' about Win7 RC shutting off 1 March. Crap. That means I need to go buy a copy of Window$7 to keep using it. No biggie... except that if I'd bought during the pre-order days, I could've gotten a 'Family Pack' of 3 licenses for around $150-ish. Now, I'm stuck with $319 for a copy of Ultimate (because I needed the XP Retro-support and wanted to try 64-bit... which Ultimate also has 32-bit included in case 64-bit blows up).

So far, so good. Everything went well... and I'm getting my other applications plugged in as well. I also upgraded my Office to 2007, since there's a Government-Employee Home-Use program, I was able to get Office 2007 for $22. Hey - why not? (Also got Symantec End-Point Anti Virus for free through the same program...)

OK - so here's another entry with some actual news.

... is good news, I suppose. Everything's still behavin', so I ain't messing with it.

OK - I finally got this turd working again... sort of. The forums are still down (like who really cares, anyway...) and the EasyPHP Calendar won't work right, causing the PHP version of the front page to not load properly. Whatever... the calendar has never worked right anyway, so no big loss there.

The big thing is that I got the webserver reloaded, PHP and MySQL working somewhat so I can have my blogs back, and we'll go from there.

Thank you Randy, for your advice in dumping the entire 'data' folder back into MySQL, rather than just the folders I thought it needed.

Now, it's a matter of getting all of these blogs to 'cross post' so I can stop having to post the same entry on several blogs when it's pertinent to more than one topic (like this one, for instance). But that's for another day... as long as this pile keeps running and FTP stays up, that is.

Edit: Alright - so I lied... the forums are up. I had them redirected wrongly in the link on the front page. After all the hassle I've had with this stuff, I'll take whatever I can get.

OK - I've been neglecting my blogs and everything else on my site since the last entries. I'm going to do a better job of keeping things updated this year... it's the least I can do since I spend a lot of wasted time on my machines these days anyway.

One of the first things I'm going to attempt is consolidating these individual blogs so that I can 'cross-post' things and have a better system. As it is right now, if I post something that happened with the Honda on the 'Hatch Blog,' one must go to the 'Hatch Blog' to read it - which means I sometimes have to copy the post into the main blog if it's the only newsworthy thing I do during the day. Once I consolidate everything, I should be able to make a post (no matter what the topic) and it will be displayed in 'Basic Blah' (main blog for news) as well as the specific category it addresses. Then, if someone only wants to read about the Honda, or my computer stuff, or the Jeep (a future blog category I'm working on), they can choose those specific things. It probably doesn't make much sense the way I'm explaining it here, but I should have it squared away sometime this week or so.

Otherwise - everything's hangin' in there. I am getting the itch to build a new HTPC machine, since the DVR is acting flaky these days.

Holy Cow - all three blogs updated on the same day.

Of course, all three of them say pretty much the same thing - nothing significant happened today.

So, about the time she got the Trojan on her machine, mind decided it was time to mess up again. This time, it decided to act like it had only 32MB RAM and a 20MB Hard Drive - Windows would come up and run fine for about a minute into the desktop, then the HDD light would just strobe every second or so and nothing would happen. The mouse would be fine as well as the 'Lock' keys functioned fine.

Occasionally, I when I would restart the machine, I'd notice that it couldn't find the HDD at all to boot from. I noticed in the BIOS sometimes it wasn't there. After cracking open the case, I discovered what appeared to be a 'loose' SATA cable. No biggie - just swap in a new one. Still no effect on the problem.

So, last night I decided to swap the original Maxtor HDD back in, since I'd rehabbed it in BigDawg by slicking the boot partition after all the WinXP weirdness.

Now it's back in the machine with Windows 7 RC running and so far, so good.

If it craps out again though - I'm tossing all this junk out and getting a whole new box. This thing has been WAY too much of a PITA - especially since BigDawg is still sitting right under the desk and hasn't even puked once in 2 years.

'Newer' doesn't always mean 'better.'

OK - so McAffee did its usual fine job of finding exactly nothing. The trojan was even smart enough to jack up the Group permissions so that anybody or any group with any kind of administrator rights was stopped from executing them.

I actually went file-by-file through the 'C' drive and hacked out anything that had yesterday's date listed and poked through the registry. It still booted fine and ran with no signs of any malicious code - except for the Admin permissions being trashed. So, I popped the XP setup disk in and ran it with the 'Repair' option. Apparently Windows was so jacked up now that it performed a re-install... but decided to take pity on me and not wipe out all of the accounts and settings.

Once back up to the desktop, I was able to finally run the Trojan Remover I d/l's last night and it couldn't find anything either. Symantec AV (government version) gave the 'all-clear' as well. Who knows what else is messed up - but again... not my machine.

If it's too jacked up even after all that, I guess a flush and reinstall is in order.

Whatever.

Great - she got some kind of a Trojan on her machine yesterday. So last night, I tried everything I had in my toolbox: Winternals ERD 2003, Windowz XP Bart PE (older versions of McAffee Stinger, Ad-Aware, SpyBot S & D, and something else that didn't work). That was after attempting to run the already installed A/V and Anti-Spyware utilities through Safe-Mode with no luck, since it essentially locked out the Administrator account from the utilities. Also tried to install Norton Internet Security 2009, but again - admin functions are locked out.

The trojan (won't even let me get a good ID) has installed itself pretty much everywhere on the 'C' drive, and attempts to send e-mails to the 'mother ship' once Windows comes up.

So today, I learned how to build my own Windows XP Bart PE bootable CD with the latest versions of Ad-Aware and McAffee Stinger I could find. Trouble is, people have kinda lost interest in the Bart PE project and aren't providing a lot of support in the way of updated definitions and plug-ins. Took me an hour just to find the latest definition files for Ad-Aware SE, since they moved away from SE and have a newer version now. Never did find the AntiVir plug-ins.

But, I got the XP Bart PE CD built and booted about a half hour ago. Stinger's still deep-scanning the 'C' drive, and I still have Ad-Aware yet to run. So hopefully, I'll get this one taken care of without having to flush and reload. If not - oh well - nobody can say I haven't given this my best effort.

Alright! So I got Windows 7 RC from a pal and installed it last night after I got it home. The Beta I had was an early version and had somehow expired - it gave me the whole 'gonna shut down in an hour' type message, so I bugged Jim for the RC. He had already burned me a copy and had it with him.

Got home, tossed it on the machine and things are good. The Beta I had seemed to have more cool stuff with it, but oh well... none of it was stuff I'm likely to use anyway. I guess that's how they hook you - promise all sorts of cool stuff early on, then when you get closer to the real deal, they yank some of it back.

I was also happy to find that nVidia had some '7' drivers for my ASUS GeForce 8500 vid card... so everything actually looks a bunch crisper and brighter on this old 21" Dell CRT of mine... even at 1600x1200. I'm still trying to dump the resolution back down to more reasonable levels, but it drops the image size and centers it, rather than drop the resolution and stretch to fit the monitor. Kinda sucks, but I've got it back out to 1600x1200, and just zoom in the web pages that are tough to read. (Sigh) Oh well - progress, right?

I was also happy to find a cool Mahjong game added to the stack of games offered. Sad - all this new computer horsepower goodness, and I'm playing Spider Solitaire and Microsoft Mahjong.

So apparently, I've been on the Computer Gods' Shit-List for the past two weeks or so. Probably had something to do with all my waving of the middle finger in their general direction during my time. I figured we were past all that, but apparently they hold grudges.

Anyway, after fighting with TopDawg for the past week, I've discovered a few things:

• The ASUS board causes some hard drive weirdness - usually resulting in a bad block or sector in the primary boot partition. This caused the installation of whatever OS I attempted to lock up and hang the machine when it hit bad block/sector.
• The heatsink that came with the AMD 7750 I bought this week absolutely sucks and is completely inadequate. After swapping the 'old' heatsink from the AMD 5000 I originally had for this machine, things cooled down immensely inside the box.
• The MSI board has crappy audio, but at least it runs. Maybe I'll snag an add-on sound card somewhere.
• I can literally change out the motherboard and internals on this machine in the dark. My computer room is almost a cave when the lights are off, and I was just fed-up enough with having to swap back to the MSI mobo that I didn't even bother with the lights. I did cheat and use an LED Mini-Mag for the front panel connections to the mobo though.

Basically, I'm guessing I received a bad motherboard almost 18 months ago when I originally built this machine for my pal Mike. The 'symptoms' (as I call them) migrated from the ASUS mobo to the MSI through the hard drive because when the ASUS would crap out, it would leave the bad block/sector on the hard drive. When I would use the hard drive with the MSI mobo, the bad block/sector was already there, and since I had data on it, I wasn't willing to repair and format the whole thing. The original hard drive I thought might've been bad has been repaired and is running like a champ in BigDawg (who's waiting to become my next webserver... another story of having pissed off the Computer Gods).

Right now, I've got TopDawg running on a Windows 7 Beta, which I intended to upgrade to the RC and snag a copy of 7 Ultimate when it goes on sale. I guess I need to run the hot-rod with a new OS, but my old junk can just swing with whatever's leftover. Win2K Adv Server and XP have served me faithfully for many years now, and I can't see the reason to quit using them for project machines just because Microsoft has quite supporting the OS - I rarely use Windows Updater to manage my junk anyway.

But for now, so far - so good. We'll see how long this all runs with Win7 Beta. If it blows up, everything except the case and my data gets thrown out and I build a hot-rod Ubuntu box and call it good.

So I picked up a new CPU yesterday from a local shop I know and trust. It's an AMD Athlon X2 7750 (AM2+ socket, and an absolute rocket). I figured, why not - try the CPU since all of the other symptoms migrated between changing the motherboards, RAM, and hard drives, so the only thing really left are the CPU and Video Card (yeah, right... like a bad video card would be the problem).

I decided since I was going to be trying a new CPU that I'd swap back to the original ASUS M2N SLI-Deluxe mobo. Swapping it back in was no big deal... everything went fine. The ASUS board is quite a bit bigger than the MSI board, but there's plenty of room in the case.

I did some reading and discovered that in order to run the AM2+ CPU, I'd have to flash the BIOS to the 1701 version. No worries. That went quick and painless with the ASUS EZ Flash utility in the BIOS.

Fired it up and it ran through the XP setup fairly quick... until it made it to the '35 minutes to go - Installing Devices' section... then it seems to hang for some reason. I just found something in the BIOS that's Vista-specific when enabled... so I disabled it and turned off the SMART Hard Drive feature as well. Other than that, the RAM is timed properly (4-4-4-4-12) and everything should be good to go with the 'Auto' settings.

Beats me why this pile won't run right.

I snagged a 4-port USB/SVGA KVM with cables from MWave.com for less than $60... now I'm just too lazy to install the damn thing. This means I'll have to tear apart the whole desk again just to run the cables, and I really don't feel like doing that today.

The Logitech keyboard is working great, and I know I need to do it so I can have full functionality over the other machines. But, screw it - I've still got the Microsoft POS plugged in and can swap over to the other machines if I have to with it. Maybe one of these days next week, I'll get off me arse and do it right.

So I got this Logitech keyboard plugged into TopDawg. I'm not entirely sure if I like it or not. The keyboard's not a 'natural' style, so it feels weird sitting here at my machine without having a natural style keyboard.

So far though, the keys seem to be much more sure of themselves when I push on them. The Shift and Ctrl keys seem to hold the signal better as well. The only sucky part is that the whole deal is USB-driven. I tried plugging the receiver into a PS2-USB adapter and no-go - it doesn't provide enough power for the receiver to, well, receive, and play 'keyboard' at the same time.

As I sit here typing this, I'm getting used to the feel of it, and I kind like how the 'wave' part of the keyboard works. I'll probably leave it plugged in and figure out what I need to do to keep it in use. I might just have to buy a new KVM (a USB KVM instead of the PS2/SVGA unit I have. I don't know... we'll have to see how it goes. It's kind nice not dropping keystrokes anymore... can't say that with the Microsoft keyboard.

The wrist-rest (more like palm-rest) is made of some kind of porous leather-like material. Feels good, and doesn't let my hands slide around like the Microsoft keyboard. The old Logitech keyboard had a textured plastic 'rest which is polished smooth from where my hands rested.

I dunno. Probably have to mess with it a few days and figure out what I want to do. KVMs and all their cables are getting cheaper, after all.

When I built TopDawg, I decided I needed a new keyboard, primarily because everything on the desk is now black - except my trusty ol' white Logitech Cordless Freedom keyboard.

There was nothing wrong with it, mind you - except that it's not black.

So I snagged a really nice new-gen Microsoft Natural keyboard - only to discover that my 'dumb-ass' spell while in Office Depot had my buy a wired keyboard. No biggee - I'll just run the wire to the KVM and use the USB-PS2 adapter.

Bzzzzzt! Sorry... not gonna work. Microsoft doesn't like those things.

Crap.

So I went back and bought a wireless Microsoft natural keyboard, thinking it would be really great. And if it would work properly, it would be great. But no - my luck has this thing dropping keystrokes and not holding the signal when I press down the 'shift' or 'ctrl' keys while trying to use all the shortcuts I've grown accustomed to.

Double Crap!

So tonight I snagged a Logitech Wireless Wave Pro keyboard, hoping I'll be able to make it work. I'll mess with it this weekend.

BTW - the reason I'm so picky is because after all these years of using PCs, I still haven't developed carpal-tunnel or anything of the sort... so I must be doing something right. That, and my KVM works by hitting 'Scroll Lock' twice and selecting the number of the switch position for the machine I want to go to - I have 4 of them on this switch. So my keyboard MUST have Scroll Lock functionality. Most of the ones I've seen in trying to weed out the others haven't had the key. Hopefully, this new one will. If not - maybe I'll just take the ol' trusty white Logitech Cordless Freedom outside and rattle-can it black or something.

Reloaded TopDawg today. It had some nit-noid issues, probably brought on by the motherboard swap - it plugged through without demanding I re-install Windows... so I didn't. I suspect that I should've just done that all along. Oh well - it's all good now. The jury's still out on this new Microsoft wireless keyboard though. The left 'ctrl' button and occasionally some other keys don't register. I don't know if that's 'normal' or if I type too fact for the keyboard or what. It gets old. I guess I need to find a new, black wireless Logitech keyboard, since the original one was still plugging along just fine (it was white and I wanted a new black one is the only reason I swapped it).

Actually, I spoke too soon with that last post. The machine's crashing got worse and more frequent - to the point that I actually lost the week's worth of e-mail I'd accrued while working on the new machine - I can probably recover it if I really wanted to - but nah... too much hassle. Nothing really imperative anyway.

I installed the new MSI mobo on January 24th and it's been running like a champ since. I shut it off during the time I was TDY (for almost 2 weeks), but right back on when I got home, and it's been doing great. The temps are acceptable, and the machine seems to run great. I'm not so keen on the on-board sound card - it's not nearly as nice as the on-board ASUS puts on their mobos. It doesn't suck so bad that I feel the need to get an add-on sound card or anything... it just has a weird 'decrecendoing-fluttering' sound when the tunes wind-down during the fade-out. The software equalizer is tougher to make friends with as well - I've actually got the Winamp equalizer set 'flat' and the soundcard EQ running it's 'Powerful' settings... which sounds good... but still not as good as it did with the ASUS.

Other than that - the machine's a beast! It runs UT3 like nobody's business, and seems to do everything else just fine as well. I've got the majority of my stuff migrated over (minor stuff left now) and should be ready to build the new webserver out of BigDawg (next week after the CISSP test kicks my ass) and make the rest of my transitions happen.

I just installed a new MSI K9A2GM-FIH mobo in my 'new' PC. Well, I guess the only things not 'new' are the CPU and CD-DVD/RW. The ASUS M2N SLI-Deluxe mobo just couldn't resist BSOD'ing every now and then. Oddly enough, I swapped mobo's and fired it up - Windows booted, griped about finding new hardware, asked for a reboot, then told me I'd need to re-install a couple of things. I did, and it's running fine right now. Interesting.

Here's hoping it hasn't been the CPU this whole time. Although, if it was the CPU this whole time - I could probably get away with building another machine out of all the new troubleshooting parts I now have.

OK - follow-up to the last post: the machine is back up. However, lots of hassle and problems ensued. Every time I tried to reload Windows came up with a new challenge and failure. I finally bought a new hard drive since the MBR seemed to be getting roached every time this thing crashed. I had even gotten to the point that a fresh install of Windows (on the new hard drive, no less) required a 'Reload/Repair' just to get to the desktop. This was after setting all of the BIOS settings to 'Default.' Still had issues once it did finally get to the desktop - it was acting like it had 64MB of PC-100 RAM in it - and took 3 hours just to install the chipset drivers before it finally froze up and crashed for the last time.

I jumped on Newegg.com and ordered a new motherboard - an MSI K9A2GM-FIH to replace the one in there now.

Then today, after poking around on AnandTech forums, I decided to do some research on the RAM I'd recently bought to solve these issues. Turns out that the Crucial Ballistix PC-6400 DDR2 RAM likes to have it's own CAS settings... and the ASUS mobo wasn't quite working with the 'Auto' settings. The RAM likes CAS settings of 4/4/4/12 and 2.0V(olts) of juice. The 'Auto' settings were 5/5/5/18 and 1.8V - well, that'll do it.

Once I manually set the mobo's memory settings to play nice with the RAM, I had an uneventful and successful installation of XP. I even loaded everything back onto the hard drive (I'm going to let BigDawg handle the e-mail for a little while longer) though. I also just played Unreal Tournament 3 for about an hour with nary a skip, stutter, or burp from the machine - and it only warmed up the CPU to 56C... to which it promptly cooled back down to 46C once the game shut off.

I'm not calling this one solved by any means, however I'll give the machine the benefit of doubt for now, since it seems to have begun to behave after tweaking the RAM settings. If it hasn't crashed in a month or so, then I'll press on with my tech-refresh/migration project. I'm also beginning to wonder if the RAM settings would've allowed the Kingston ValueRAM I originally purchased to run as well. Who knows.

Now, I guess I just need to get another CPU and an optical drive, and I can build yet another machine with the new mobo, RAM, hard drive, and case I won't be using as a result of this project.

This is one of those annoying things I do for fun. Ever since the guy at Power Systems soaked me for $3200 for a new PC in October '96, I've learned how to build my own. Not to mention, my pal (and Boss at the time) Lewis McBride kinda snapped me into the reality that I was a computer technician, and I shouldn't be afraid to build my own junk. He was right, of course. My other friend Al Peterson (a VMS programmer) helped me over my anxiety of blowing up Windows and making applications work with each other even when they don't see to want to.

I think had I not had those guys influencing me and helping me over the fence (as it were) I wouldn't be as in-touch with my machines as I am now. I'm not fanatical about it or anything, but I do know I've just spent the better part of 16 hours fussing with my new machine getting it to work, rather than admit defeat. In the past, I would've just ordered a new mother board (which I already did, actually) before taking on trying to actually troubleshoot something like what I was up against. I still may need the new mobo, but for now I think I might've actually won this one.

Lewis might even be a little proud of me, if he knew what I've gone through with this new machine.

My 'new' machine crapped out last night... right after I commented on how I think it's probably fixed since it had been running strong for two weeks now. I fired up Unreal Tournament 3 to chase away some boredom, and it promptly BSOD'd. All attempts to restart Windows failed with the 'mup.sys' file, which I've tried a couple of things to resolve with no luck - the boot-sector's wiped out, and all efforts to repair through Windows XP (both the Recovery Console (fixboot) as well as simply 'Repair/Reload' through the installer) have failed.

I did notice that the CPU core temp was 60C, although with the new 'internal' temp probes, that's supposed to be normal. Even so, I switched direction of the airflow on the rear chassis fans to blow cooler outside air across the CPU heatsink, instead of pulling warm air through the machine. Dropped the CPU temp by 10 to ~50C, and the mobo temp a couple degrees as well. But now the power supply might be running a little warmer as a result, thanks to the change in flow. I'll probably reverse the flow on its fans also.

But for now, it's time to reload Windows, and rebuild the 'C' drive along with reinstalling all of the cool apps and games I'd been using the past few weeks (fortunately, not too many of them yet). I'm tempted to get some image-ware (like Ghost or something) and build the image of the 'C' drive once I've got all the major stuff installed and running.

Maybe next time (as I'm pretty sure there will be a next time, after this).

Holy Crap that was cool!

I'd never run a force-feedback wheel before, and I have to say: it was awesome! Of course, when I plugged it in, and it took off calibrating itself it freaked me right the f00k out! As soon as the left LED lit, it took off and did some pretty cool stuff - all by itself.

Then, while I was in the Logitech software, checking out the buttons and stuff, as soon as I pressed the left paddle shifter, this huge explosion blew through the headphones and the wheel reacted accordingly. Crazy! Then the right paddle shifter, and it flashed 'blow-out' on the screen and I heard (and felt) what seemed very much like a tire blowing out.

Man, I should've gotten one of these things years ago!

I goofed around with my newest driving game: Need For Speed - Underground (yeah... I know it's a 6-year-old game... fire me!). Pretty fun stuff. Too bad there's not a car download for my '95 Honda Civic hatchback. Also loaded up and played a couple rounds of Need For Speed - Porsche Unleashed. Had a totally blast. Even tried loading up and running 'Whiplash!', but man do the graphics suck on that game. Which is a complete bummer, 'cause I used to love playing that game. The announcer cracks me up. I wish they'd come up with an updated version of that game. Of course, I wish they had Gran Turismo 3 for the PC as well - since I refuse to buy a console.

Oh well, I have plenty of cool games to keep me busy for years.

I just hope the joystick works with the AUI-to-USB adapter plug I bought as well as this wheel.