Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

StorageReview.com – Tiki. Now that I’ve got my hard drives lined up, I’m curious how to measure performance. For instance if I go to RAID-0, is it really worth the trouble. The StorageReview.com FAQ at least tells you some benchmarks to avoid. Most are not great, surprising given the impact of disk on performance. Best…

Well, in the last six months, I’ve lost the power supply of all three pieces of network equipment. Not their fault, but a good reminder of where the vulnerabilities are in today’s equipment. Someone at Google told me that their top two failure spots were power supplies and hard drives. The other sad thing is…

OK, in two of my installations, I have the system disk on E and the data on C. Kind of inconvenient since the other three are the other way. The disk partitions are also the wrong size, so I need to reinstall on C drive and then shrink the C and enlarge the E. While…

Since I’ve been descending into geekdom, might as well go all the way, the current rage is to water-cool your CPU. Since heat is the biggest enemy when overclocking, folks have been using exotic cooling to get much better performance. If you nitrogen cool your Pentium for instance, you can get to 4GHz from a…

Well, I’ve gotten the new power supply and it sure has helped. Here is where I am: # System runs stably at 198MHz, but won’t pass Prime95’s validation suite. Backing down the memory to 191MHz seems to make the system super stable. I’m guessing that it is the cheap RAM that is the problem. The…

Well, I had thought that the Outlook 2003 spam filter would obviate the need for external spam filters, but either I don’t understand it or I it doesn’t work well. Basically, it doesn’t seem to work in cached mode and it seems to require you to click before it fliters things. In any case, I…

Well, here’s what I’ve learned about really debugging a PC that is crashing. Script for future use: # Get a device count and estimate power supply requirements. Make sure the power supply is adequate to the job. Otherwise, go get another one. # Run memtest86+ overnight. Make sure the basic CPU and memory systems don’t…

I had great hopes for this integrated graphics system. Might save me from having to buy AGP cards. Unfortunately, the data shows that a $50 AGP card easily beats it. And it is 2-3x slower than a state of the art $200 card. These kind of integrated solutions are good for office applications though and…

If you’re working with color pictures, getting the right color on the screen is pretty hard. Fortunately, several sites produce things called ICMs, these are used by Windows to correct colors for you. For the displays that I support, here are the ICMs. You also have to set brightness (really black level) and contrast (really…

With miniturization, it’s fascinating to see all the things people are building with USB. Here’s a small summary: * “Memory + Wifi”:http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1533. Gigabyte GN-WLBZ201 and the TwinMOST “B241”:http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/69/34565.html is a USB 1.1 device (so kinda slow) with 32-256MB of flash memory plus a 802.11b card inside of it. Great idea for older laptops. Two in…

Since I’ve been getting rid of these floppy drives in my machines, I was wondering what else can fit into them, here are two good candidates: * “4-Port USB Hub”:https://www.rogerssystems.com/store/moreinfo.cfm?Product_ID=765. $20 and it is much neater than an external hub or “SIIG”:http://www.siig.com/product.asp?partnum=JU-H41B22&category=USB. * “USB and Firewire Hub”:http://www.cables4computer.com/leftlinks/Product_Links.asp?M1=USB%20and%20Firewire&sub1=Hubs&sub2=USB. $99 and you can get a Firewire and…

“CPU Temperatures”:http://www.pantherproducts.co.uk/Articles/CPU/CPU%20Temperatures.shtml. Now with Superfan,, I can see CPU temperatures, but what’s a good temperature to run? Well, they vary by processor, but according to pantherproducts.co.uk, you should say 20 degrees C below the critical (e.g, above this I burn out) temperatures: | Processor Family | Critical | Stay Below… | | AMD Athlon “Barton”…

Arrgghh. I removed two disk drives from my hurting ASUS A7N8X-X machine, but I’m stil getting random reboots. Next suspect is memory problems. There are actually quite a few memory testers around: * “Memtest86”:http://www.memtest86.com/. The grand daddy. Now has bootable CD version. Requires 8KB and tests like crazy. Hasn’t been updated since 2002 though, so…

“CD Freaks”:http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/134/. A super comprehensive review of the new NEC ND-2500A. It is the first drive that can write DVD-Rs at 8x. (Most drives can now write 8x DVD+Rs). But, the most impressive thing is that it has very low write error rates for CDs and DVDs. The same piece does some great recommendations for…

“CD Freaks”:http://www.cdfreaks.com/article/134/. A super comprehensive review of the new NEC ND-2500A. It is the first drive that can write DVD-Rs at 8x. (Most drives can now write 8x DVD+Rs). But, the most impressive thing is that it has very low write error rates for CDs and DVDs. Most interesting though is that they go through…

OK, so I just used the “Power Calculator”:http://www.jscustompcs.com/power_supply/ to see how close I am to the limits for the machines I’ve built: | Machine | JS Power Estimate | Power Supply | Random Crashes | | ASUS A7N8X-X | 448 watts | 350 watts | 1/10 minutes | | Shuttle SB61G2 | 281 | 200…