Zxian

Well... you probably just don't like the girls that are in your school. They never appreciate our 1337-ness... haha

Eating better - find a fruit that you like instead of other snack foods. Try to cut back on meals a little bit - instead of eating until you're full, eat until you're filled. Walk as much as you can, and take the stairs instead of taking the elevator. I climb to the 4th floor to get to my work, and I'll usually go up and down about 3-4 times a day. Try to start playing sports with your friends. There are a lot of great fun sports that don't require a big organization or a team. I play for an Ultimate Frisbee team with a bunch of friends - running around for about 3 hours straight on Sundays - whee yay! Hope this helps. You've got a great goal set out.

Just a side note about the pagefile and Acronis True Image - the last time I checked, ATI just included it as part of the file structure, but never actually saved the contents of the pagefile data in the image file.

I did try the Business Edition for my system, but it only supports certain UPS lineups - and the Back-UPS isn't included. I'll have to play around with the electrical configuration to see if I can fix the problem.

I picked up one of these on my way home to play around with. I've got both my systems hooked up to it, along with the networking equipment. I connected the USB cable to my Server 2003 machine, and the UPS showed up in Power Management as the system "battery". I installed the PowerChute Personal Edition software though, and I think I'll keep it. It's got all the funky data about what's going on at any given moment. Right now, with all computer equipment connected (router, switch, 2 LCDs, workstation, server) and both computers crunching away at 100% (Rosetta@Home) the system is providing ~380W of power. I haven't setup any scripts, but I'll be playing with that in a sec... EDIT - So the UPS works as it should. I managed to get Server 2003 to shutdown my workstation remotely, but only after uninstalling all APC software. The Business Edition wouldn't recognize my UPS (since it's not a SmartUPS series), and the personal edition has no ability to manage anything remotely. After uninstalling the APC Personal Edition software, I setup low battery and critical battery warnings to shutdown my workstation and server respectively. I did find one snag with the whole setup though - I inherently have a ground loop setup with my workstation and speakers. This seems to cause more problems with EMI when the whole setup is connected to the UPS than when it's connected to a straight surge protector. I'll have to play around with this a bit more to track down the exact cause, but I have a feeling that it's due to the built-in AVR on the UPS.

I guess I could grab this UPS for testing purposes. It's got both the USB and serial connectivity, so I can test the "both or either/or" question at hand. I've been digging around the net for a while, and read up on some Linux implementations where one system would initiate the shutdown of another. Is there any simple way I could do that from my file server to my workstation? I'd connect the two machines, as well as my router and switch to the UPS, so they'd all be online and working. Something like what this KB describes, no?

Thanks for the info. I'm wondering though, if all else fails, would I be able to use a USB->Serial adaptor like this one. to create the interface? It looks like I might be able to plug that adaptor into the interface expander, and then just deal with USB cables from there. Also, if that works, could I use the USB connection for one computer, and the serial connection for the other (assuming the UPS has both)?

I'm wondering if anyone knows of any UPS systems that can be setup to shutdown two computers in the event of a power failure. I know lots of them can connect to a single machine using USB, but I don't know if they'll support two. Thanks in advance!

My #1 guess - some form of malware (and someone with a nasty sense of humor). Scan your computer with: Avast, Spybot S&D, Ad-Aware, AVG Anti-Spyware.

Considering that I've never tried it, I'd follow Memnoch's advice about avoiding RAID5 on the onboard controller. You'd probably be best off using the 320GB drives as you said - for the OS and programs. I'll get to your question about partitions later... As for the RAID/ACHI drivers, I've got them somewhere on my system here, but I'll have to dig around to find them. I'll post a link for you to download them from and integrate them using nLite (like I did for both of my systems). The ICH8R does indeed support RAID10. Don't be confused by the higher "number" meaning more computationally intensive. RAID10 is actually not very demanding on resources at all. The reason why RAID5 requires computing power is because parity information is calculated for every bit of data that is written to the drives. With RAID10, the data is simply written to one location or the other, so the calculations involved are near negligible. This site has a great explaination of various RAID levels. I'll admit, their diagram for RAID10 is horrible, but if you look at the one for RAID0+1 and think the other way around, you'll hopefully understand what's going on. If you go with just RAID0, 1, and/or 10 for your system, you shouldn't need to worry about any significant performance decrease from your storage subsystem. I used to partition all my drives into various parts, but I've moved away from doing that, now that I've got multiple hard drives. I generally just categorize everything into folders and let my defragmentation program deal with the rest. A RAID0 drive must be wiped clean to be created, but I think that it *might* be possible to span a single drive into a RAID1 array. That being said - I'd still think you're better off just wiping and starting from scratch if you can. There's less that can go wrong that way. You mentioned that you have a separate partition for your pagefile... there's actually been a lot of discussion about this, but generally speaking, if you've only got one disk, put the pagefile on the same partition as the operating system and software. Games should be considered software (since that's what they technically are). Keep everything that is "run" on one partition, and you can keep static data elsewhere. Personally, I think that partitions should go the way of the dinosaurs, since they don't really benefit in any way other than some form of organization (but folders can do that for you as well).

Your USB drive will wear out faster than the hard drive will. Flash memory has a limited number of I/O operations, and using it for an active system drive is a no-no. If your hard drives are dying constantly, then you've got some other problem happening. Either you're not providing them enough cooling, or you're buying the wrong drives.

Censor's warning - Memnoch is crazy about RAID10. (and probably rightfully so)

Welcome to MSFN!!! Funny you should ask... I've got two systems with that exact motherboard, and three different RAID configurations between the two. Your basic assumptions about the various RAID configurations are pretty much correct. Personally, I figure that any data that should be kept should go on RAID1 or higher. Single disks are a way of the past in my books (but others will disagree with me here... ). On my main system (Quad-core workstation), I've got two WD3200AAKS drives in RAID0. From whatever testing I've been able to do so far (HDTach and copying files with TeraCopy), I can get about 130MB/s read speeds and about 75-80MB/s write speeds. With my file server, the OS drive is built on two WD2500KS drives in RAID1. Read speeds are around the 65MB/s mark, and writing is at about 40MB/s. In my file server, I've also got a RAID5 array setup, built with 4xWD5000AAKS drives, but it's connected to a 3ware 9650SE controller. The performance is through the roof (I haven't found an upper limit to the read speed, but I know that write speeds are in excess of 110MB/s), but that's somewhat to be expected from a dedicated controller. This is my storage array, where all backups, music, pictures, and video goes. Anything that wants to be kept is stored here. At the moment, it's about half full. Is your data in a safe location right now, or is it on one of the three drives that you have? If you've got the three drives to play with, I'd suggest for your sake (and others) to test it out. One good way for you go get around any data that might be on those disks is to "temporarily buy" (buy, use, return) an external USB/eSATA drive from a store like FutureShop or BestBuy (where in Canada are you from, by the way?). Copy all your important data to the external drive, and then put it away. Tinker with your setup until you've found a setup that works for you, and then copy all the data back. That's exactly what I did with my RAID5 array, since I had about 400GB of data at the time. Personally, I prefer to split up I/O as much as possible. That's why my file server has a RAID1 array for the system drive (OS, software, temp files, etc) and a RAID5 array for static data storage. If you can, I'd try to go along the same route, with with onboard or a dedicated RAID controller if you decide to go RAID5. I know the price is slightly steep, but you might want to consider the 3ware 9650SE-4LPML. If you're worried about performance, you won't have to anymore. I don't know how the RAID5 performance is on the ICH8R chipset, but I'd be curious to find out. Let us know what you're thinking. Hope this helps! P.S. Let me be the first to say a very big thank you for having done your homework ahead of time.

They're completely different CPUs. Just because a CPU will fit into a socket doesn't mean it'll work. You can't take a system with an i915 chipset and use a Core2Duo/Quad, for example. At this point, you're SOL. There isn't anything you can do to upgrade the CPU in that computer.

This is rediculous. People just don't know their terminology. A gigabyte is indeed a billion bytes, while a gibibyte is 2^30 bytes. Technically, there's no wrong-doing here, since they're providing what they're advertising. When you buy a 1GHz CPU, the clock ticks away at one billion times per second, not 1.073 billion. When you buy a 1GB flash card, you're getting the one billion bytes of storage that you were promised. When you buy 1GB of RAM, you're actually getting a bonus of 7.3% (but nobody complains about that).

That's a big thread bump...

In my experience, if you don't find an error within one hour, you probably won't find one within 12.

Yup - you can burn it using Nero. In Nero Burning ROM, go to Recorder->Burn Image. At the top left of the dialog box, select DVD from the menu. Voila!

The PS2->USB converter should work without any trouble in most cases. Here's a relatively cheap 4-port KVM switch. I can't tell you anything about my experience, but it seems to have good reviews: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16817107401

Your video card should have come with a DVI->VGA adaptor, so you can even use your main computer over the KVM. The DLink one will probably work, but I'd recommend this Linksys 2-port KVM instead. I've got it here, and it works flawlessly. Sightly more expensive, but I've always prefered Linksys over DLink.

Man... it had been a while since I used this program, but boy is it ever awesome! Especially with cursor grabbing enabled, and using full screen on one of my two monitors... This is the view that I get while using my main system on the left monitor, and VirtualBox fullscreened on the right monitor (with a clean, fresh XP install). I can go back and forth between those two without any hassle!

Haha... fair enough. The internals of the case aren't too bad. It's got pretty good airflow and lots of space to work with. It's just the exterior styling that made me wonder: "What was this guy thinking?"

As long as you change the channel on your router, you should be able to avoid problems.

Huh... Explorer doesn't use 100% of my CPU, and I've got the Q6600@3.0Ghz. If you've got that kind of hanging going on, then there's something seriously wrong with your system.

The Corsair HX520 will power that system without any troubles. I've got just about the same specs as you (slightly lower end video card) and my system draws less than 200W from the wall socket at full load. Personally, I find the case you've chosen... ugly. I'd rather go for something a little more sleek looking, but if the alien-style spaceship look is what you're after, then go for it. From what I can tell, the Vento 7700 has plenty of space for the video card you've chosen. It's usually smaller cases that run into troubles with large video cards.