Useless Conversation

[Paelos]

And did you manage to avoid having your friends spill it to your date?

Yes, until the next day. 

[ghost]

And did you manage to avoid having your friends spill it to your date?

Yes, until the next day. 

Awkward drive home, eh?

[Paelos]

Yeah, you could say that. Thank god for the NFL broadcast on the radio.

[bhodi]

Wait, aren't you extremely religious? Sex before marriage?

[Chimpy]

Wait, aren't you extremely religious? Sex before marriage?

Maybe he uses the Catholic schoolgirl definition of what is and isn't sex.

"It isn't sex if you can't get pregnant from it."

[Ironwood]

By that definition the wife and I ARE having sex with our weekly scrabble tournament.

 

[Engels]

whoa, Iw, TMI man

[Paelos]

Wait, aren't you extremely religious? Sex before marriage?

Maybe he uses the Catholic schoolgirl definition of what is and isn't sex.

"It isn't sex if you can't get pregnant from it."

HA! I'll have to remember that one.

[Ironwood]

Yeah, it's racy.  And totally True*


*May not be true.

[Merusk]

Wait, aren't you extremely religious? Sex before marriage?

Maybe he uses the Catholic schoolgirl definition of what is and isn't sex.

"It isn't sex if you can't get pregnant from it."

That one makes me laugh every time I hear it.  "I'm still a Virgin, I only have done anal and oral."

 

[Lantyssa]

I'm curious what's happening with those Scrabble tiles.

[Sky]

There's a reason guys love catholic school girls. Such a great mix of sweet and totally perverted.

[Selby]

Catholic girls at the CYO, you love how they go?

[RhyssaFireheart]

First thing I'd do is see if you can run a dskchk on the hard drive, Rhyssa. Do you have a Windows CD of some sort that lets you boot to it and then get to a DOS prompt? In Vista and Windows 7, you'd select 'repair my computer' and then select the last option for a command prompt. It doesn't have to be a Windows Vista or 7 OS that you're repairing. Just run the dskchk utility to see if you have either a simple file system corruption or you are indeed working wwith a failing hard drive.

If all you have is a Windows XP cd, the steps are a bit more fiddly and unclear, but fairly easy nontheless.

I have an XP disk I can boot with, but the system isn't seeing a hard drive.  I'm going to open my new system up and see if it's got a similar connection, but the old comp was a SATA drive on a raid 0 (I think) setup.  It's been so long since I checked and now I can't because the freaking HDD seems to have died on me.  Dammit.  This is the exact same thing that happened when I upgraded from my Dimension to this XPS years ago.  Turned the old comp off to set the new comp up, went back to the old comp and it was dead. :(

[Engels]

raid 0 takes at least a pair of drives. If you open up your old machine and see two hard drives, then yep, maybe you have raid 0. It can be confusing, since even a computer 3 years old will have an Intel ICH9 hard drive controller that mentions RAID or AHCI, but more often than not its just a single drive in either 'normal' legacy mode, or AHCI (basically a single drive with slightly advance features).

If you discover that you aren't running Raid 0 (you only see on drive) then there's one other thing:

If the BIOS says that the controller is running in AHCI, then the Windows XP disk will NOT see the drive because it doesn't have the AHCI drivers on the disk. You can get around this by changing the setting to 'legacy' or 'normal' in the BIOS under Drives>Sata Operation (if its the BIOS layout I'm thinking).

The other solution is finding the AHCI drivers on the intel site, making a floppy disk, and when the Windows XP disk loads, hit F6 and load the drivers from the floppy. This is very fiddly, tho.

The other option is just finding a SATA>USB external enclosure and taking the disk out.

The last option is to use a Vista or Windows 7 disk. Those have the AHCI and raid drivers to see the drive.

 

[RhyssaFireheart]

Well, I sort of fixed the issue.  I took the old drive out, opened my new machine and plopped it in there.  And yes, it was a single drive.  System still didn't see the drive and I wasn't feeling any vibrations with power on, so I turned everything off, disconnected the drive again, and basically just smacked it into my hand.  Put it back into my new computer and it's working - kind of.

Right now I'm running an error check on the old drive.  It's noisy as hell and slow, but I'm hoping it'll fix any issues to the point where I can just do a mass dump of info off this drive and not worry about things any longer.  I'd tried just accessing some folders when the drive came up, but it kept locking up so that's when I went to the error checking option.  I'll see where this gets me and then go from there.

[Ironwood]

Ah, the good old 'Smack it With Your Hand' approach.  Works on everything from Hard Drives to Pert Bottoms.

[IainC]

Percussive maintenance.

[ghost]

Wasn't an actual fix for one of the old Apple computers to raise it six inches off the ground and drop it? 

[Selby]

When I bang on a relay cabinet or smack something around at work, the proper definition we put in the site log book is "mechanical agitation" since "smacked it around a bit" started making operators and bossmen nervous.

[Rasix]

The term we use is "re-seat".

[Sky]

Catholic girls at the CYO, you love how they go?

I was thinking more freaky styley.

[Murgos]

That one makes me laugh every time I hear it.  "I'm still a Virgin, I only have done anal and oral."

Without a condom though, because the pope said condoms are evil.  But, I guess you can't get an STD if god loves you so who needs em?

[Ingmar]

Wasn't an actual fix for one of the old Apple computers to raise it six inches off the ground and drop it? 

Sun SPARC 2s were kind of like this, if I'm remembering right, there was some kind of manufacturing flaw with the drives that you could fix with the smack-on-a-table method.

[Oban]

Without a condom though, because the pope said condoms are evil.  But, I guess you can't get an STD if god loves you so who needs em?

Also, being selective when choosing a partner helps.

[Trippy]

Wasn't an actual fix for one of the old Apple computers to raise it six inches off the ground and drop it? 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_III#Design_flaws

Sun SPARC 2s were kind of like this, if I'm remembering right, there was some kind of manufacturing flaw with the drives that you could fix with the smack-on-a-table method.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiction#Hard_disk_drives

[RhyssaFireheart]

Well, the "smack it" method seems to have worked.  Old hard drive is connected to the new computer and working.  I'm currently copying my My Documents folder over to the new computer simply because it's easier than poking through seeing what I want to keep/not keep at this stage.  Next to find my old Outlook files and back them up so I can access and I think I'll be set.  I'm half tempted to just leave the old drive connected up and mount it properly, but it's noisy and I've rather liked having a nice, quiet office.

[Sir T]

Since we are on the subject, in my new place my computer is situated 2 rooms from my phone socket. Whats the best way to connect my moden to it with regard to speed of connection

(a) wiremess network connection

(b) Connect moden to phone via long phone cable

(c) Connect via long cat 5 network cable?

[bhodi]

Depends on your internet connection. You're using 'modem' interchangeably with 'phone' which implies dialup. Are you dialup?

[Draegan]

So after nearly 2 months (one week shy of 2 months) of doing Kickboxing 3x a week I've dropped ~13 lbs.  I consider this a success since I've lost all the beer weight I usually gain from the combination of NFL and beer and Thanksgiving.  I'm also teetering on the edge of hitting the 200 + teens which I haven't been since college.

I'm going to aim for 10 more lbs, 15 if I'm really really good.

I'm wasn't overweight to begin with, and I didn't have a gut either, just some extra padding.   

Now I just have to maintain this until my wedding in April and Honeymoon in June. 

[Lantyssa]

Since we are on the subject, in my new place my computer is situated 2 rooms from my phone socket. Whats the best way to connect my moden to it with regard to speed of connection

I always prefer a wired connection over a wireless one.  With good equipment you'll likely notice little difference, but there's significantly less chance of interference and wireless routers seem to go wonky more often than wired ones.

(I'm assuming you mean a cable or DSL modem.)

[Sky]

Still don't know why my wireless connection is 600k-800k and my wired through the same damned router is 150k. Dammit. Because the wireless is flaky and resets every few hours. I also prefer wired, but the wireless is so much damned faster, I use it for downloads then disable that interface for gaming so I don't get dropped. I hate computers.

[Trippy]

Since we are on the subject, in my new place my computer is situated 2 rooms from my phone socket. Whats the best way to connect my moden to it with regard to speed of connection

(a) wiremess network connection

(b) Connect moden to phone via long phone cable

(c) Connect via long cat 5 network cable?

If it's a single computer wireless is fine assuming the signal to the computer room is strong. With multiple computers that have Gigabit Ethernet where you want to copy very large files back and forth you'll probably want a wired setup. Using shielded Cat 5/6 from the DSL modem in the same room as the phone jack to your computer would probably be better than using an unshielded phone cable to bring the DSL modem into the same room as the computer. If you can find a shielded twisted pair phone cable it probably doesn't matter either way.

[Minvaren]

Still don't know why my wireless connection is 600k-800k and my wired through the same damned router is 150k. Dammit. Because the wireless is flaky and resets every few hours. I also prefer wired, but the wireless is so much damned faster, I use it for downloads then disable that interface for gaming so I don't get dropped. I hate computers.

QoS on the router?  Hinky network cable?  NIC Driver settings/needs updating?

[Lantyssa]

Broken router?