funkadelic net connection... @_@

[Risu-chan]

just got off horrendous bursty lag on IRC and thought I'd check here, and discovered that pages here - which normally load in less than 10 seconds - are now taking me a minute and a half to get through.

If I still used my dialup connection this wouldn't surprise me, but this is a cable modem...

;_; I know the bandwidth gets shared among people in a few-block radius. Boy do I hope I'm not living next to a brand new bandwidth monster...

is anyone else getting odd lags from Hostboard/the rest of the Net, or is it just me?

[Crystallyne]

[img]graemlins/cry_smile.gif[/img]

Waahhhh!

I just got disconnected and can't reconnect to mIRC on any of the ports I know!!

ARG!! So frustrating.

~Crystal
(not having problems with this site, though)

[tenjou_sama]

Ah, so sorry all XD

I don't seem to be having problems with anything ^____^

[jadey]

hmm...nope everythings fine on my end

[Risu-chan]

More computer raving...

(in which Risu-chan somewhat embarrassedly reveals the true staggering extent of her geekitude...)

So I cobbled together a pretty kicking system back in 1999. The thing had a region-free DVD drive, a CD burner, a video capture card, and a Pentium 450, which was actually non-pathetic back in the day. ^^;; Also attached a scanner and printer to it and made it my main art computer. (Have a cheap Aiptek artpad for it but the desk is shaped wrong to let me use both the art pad and the scanner, which is kinda counterproductive for an art system; I need a longer USB cable somewhere. Anyway.)

I decided to give the thing enough of an upgrade to make it useful again. And I wanted to be able to easily back it up and make it network with my Windows 2000 laptop and maybe even make it a manga server when I'm on IRC. (I spent well over $1000 on the components back in '99. This week I spent $65 on the upgrade which will give it eight times the drive space and actual Ethernet capacity (as opposed to the original 10-gig hard drive and 56K dialup) and that $65 will probably extend its functional life by about five more years if I throw some more RAM at it one of these days. That's the only reason I like desktops: they're so much easier to upgrade than laptops... I like laptops better for actually doing things wherever you are, but my storage system is always going to be a desktop...)

So anyway, I ripped out all the guts of the thing and put in a removable drive bay (which I've used with great success in several test beds I've designed) and started putting it back together.

Since I wasn't sure what was going to end up being master drives and what was going to end up being slave drives, I changed all the drive jumpers to cable-select.

Six hours later, I finally nailed down why nothing would work unless everything was specifically set to either master or slave on both the primary and secondary IDE cables.

My motherboard and BIOS are too frippin' archaic to *correctly* interpret the cable-select option.

And to top it all off, I have to have *either* one *or* two drives on each IDE cable, and they have to be *hardwired* as master or slave with the
cable. Meaning that if I'm going to put the removable drive bay in, it *always has to contain something jumper-hardwired to know it's a slave.*

Fortunately, I'd already realized that with a bit of jimmying I could force my Zip drive to fit in one of those removable bays, and it was already set up as a slave.

So what I'm going to do with my system tomorrow is to make the main HD the primary master, the CD-RW the primary slave, the DVD the secondary master, and whatever's in the removable drive as the secondary slave.

This means that if I boot the system without an identified slave in the removable drive, neither the DVD drive nor the removable drive will work.

But this is better than the system *refusing to boot* if there's nothing in the removable drive or if a cable joggles loose...

I plan to keep the Zip disk semipermanently parked in there to make it happy, unless I'm doing massive data transfer with another hard disk, which I can always jumper-swap if need be. (memo to self: don't screw any of my HDs into a removable bay...)

(Whenever I can get the damn drive formatted, that is... Windows 2000 never does raw formats nicely; I spent the past hour and a half waiting
for it to finish formatting that new 80 gig drive I'm going to put Windows 2000 on so I can actually have something resembling a modern and updatable operating system on the thing. THe format got 99% of the way through and reported that it couldn't complete the job. I knew this was
true of a completely raw drive, but it can manage to format raw drives that have had a primary DOS partition created on all their space. I was
hoping the primary DOS partition on 10 of the 80 gigs would give it enough of a head start. (I'd already tried half a dozen times to get fdisk to recognize that this was an 80 gig drive and not a 10 gig drive, but I suspect I'm banging my head against the archaic BIOS again.)

Upshot: drive STILL not formatted. @_@ So tomorrow I take the little bastard to the test bed and I format it down there with the system that I know has at least done 40 gig hard drives successfully before... and then I pray that even if the BIOS doesn't know what to do with it, hopefully once it gets to Windows, it'll know it's got that much drive space there to work with...)

[jadey]

*blink blink*..........ummmmmm....did you win?? seems like a nasty fight with the comp. i didnt understand half of that..but it sounds very similar to the sleep talkings my dad has when he has nightmares bout comps. hehe kidding...yah well my dad is pretty obsessive bout this comp so we have like 5 hardrives..or something like that. one of em is external. about the only thing we dont have is a zip drive.....but i think we are getting that soon