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It's definitely a hardware problem. My machine is flashed with the latest BIOS(April 2000). I think that was the final version for this board. In any case, I don't think a BIOS upgrade would help since it's a matter of the chipset being able to physically address the RAM. BX chipsets just...

Unfortunately, the thread you're referring to isn't among my saved threads but this is a topic which is rarely discussed, and it's a pity because any electronic equipment is only as good as the power supply going to it. I've personally never had any need for anything more expensive than $15...

I was once in a very similar situation to you. When I was a kid I used to live in a NYC housing project which was steam heated. Each room had it's own radiator and in addition there were two pipes running vertically from floor to floor. There were openings where the pipes went through the...

I didn't return them yet, so if you or someone you know are interested in buying them let me know. I'm probably going to CompUSA tomorrow but I'll check this thread and my PMs before I go. I imagine shipping to Sydney would be a bit pricey though.

I can only imagine the sight! I don't suppose you would have been able to ride a bike instead. I'm not sure if an ape your size would be too comfortable on a normal sized bicycle. Tannin made a good point, though, and I'll add another. Never, ever be economical if it affects your health in...

I actually love walking that far in the winter(I can do five miles in under an hour), just not twice in the span of three days. It was about 35°F when I went on Friday, and I was sweating a bit by the time I got there believe it not. Doing it in the summer is the real pain. Too bad they don't...

The lowest price on pricewatch for something compatible is $21 last I checked. The only reason I bought this RAM was because it was only $10. Remember that I need to remove 2 128 MB modules to make room for the 256 MB ones, so I'm really only gaining 256 MB by doing this, even though I'll wind...

Thanks for the feedback everyone. As best as I could tell from looking up things on various sites, the problem is that the single-sided memory uses 8 RAM chips configured as 32Mx8 versus the double-sided ones which have 16 chips of 16Mx8. The M/B chipset needs to be able to address 32Mbit RAM...

Here's one I found that might interest you: http://www.iguanalabs.com/maintut.htm It has beginning, intermediate, and advanced tutorials. Learning in detail about electronics is far from trivial, and I only really started understanding how things worked once I started making my own projects...

I purchased two sticks of 256 MB PC133 SDRAM at CompUSA today. Though the machine I plan to put them in needs more RAM like I need a hole in the head(it already has 768 MB), the price was right at $9.99 each after rebates, so I figured what the heck, even though it meant I'd need to remove two...

While there's a lot of research, it seems that most of the new technologies scheduled to be implemented in the not too distant future are either read only or write once. While these are good for archiving, they will hardly replace hard drives. Among technologies that are rewriteable it doesn't...

A bit off topic, but does anyone here know why PC clocks keep such lousy time that they need to be synched to an external time source on a regular basis? A simple thing like a TCO(temperature compensated oscillator) will cost less than $10 and would make the clocks accurate to within a minute...

There shouldn't be since it doesn't warm up very quickly. On the other hand, don't put a blow dryer to it the minute you bring it in since the sudden temperature change might make it crack. ;) There is a minimum temperature under which the LCD will actually sustain damage due to the liquid...

The problem is the condensation that occurs when you go from a cold climate to a warm one, and if the laptop has indeed gotten down to -20° F then I would give it overnight to warm up before I booted it. The instructions for installing a hard drive, for example, always say to wait something...

The idea of having a controller is a good one-if it's done properly. I've seen too many temperature control devices that control cooling by having the cooling element(usually a compressor) full on all the time and using a heating element to counteract the cooling effect and stabilize at the...

I'm not 100% sure that's true. Most of the steel in autos is recycled, not made from ore. That saves a tremendous amount of energy. Consider that an SUV getting 10 mpg burns 25,000 gallons of fuel if it lasts 250,000 miles. Even one getting 25 mpg that only lasts 100,000 miles burns 4,000...

With the technology available today there's no reason why any car should get less than 75 mpg, and for the typical short trips under 50 miles that most people do, an electric car is an even more sensible choice. Or better yet walk, bike, or take a subway. SUVs are the very personification of...

I thought it was interesting that Nassau County(i.e. Long Island) is included since I agree that for what it is(just another suburb) the price of houses on Long Island is outrageously expensive. In many areas the homes approach $300,000, which is only about $50,000 less than a home in Queens...

I should have had another choice-namely a new technology or interface will make the LBA-48 limit irrelevant. The consensus so far seems to be in 15 or so years. We'll probably be standardized on S-ATA within a few years. If that interface lasts as long as P-ATA, you could be looking at 25...

Any thoughts on this? It seems that every time we bump up against a capacity limit the new one only lasts a few more years. At least this time they had the foresight to make the new limit about 1 million times the old one. BTW, the maximum size of a drive with 48-bit LBA is 144 million GB, or...

The USB connector is a POS so it might be something that simple. USB connectors are known to come loose by themselves quite easily. Perhaps a small vibration causes a momentarily break in the signal line. Since replugging it in solves that problem, you might want to see if anything is...

Looking at that graph a little more closely it seems that besides the other problem the drive is also stuck in UltraDMA mode 2(33 MB/sec). The STR is flat up to the 13 or so GB mark. Most drives only reach their maximum STR during the first 10% or so of the platter, not for nearly half the...

BTW, LiamC, is that Kimba the White Lion in your avatar? I remember that show from when I was a kid but it's been so long(~30 years) that I pretty much forgot what he looked like. We even named our first pet cat after him.

I would say it's some kind of strange interaction between the drive and controller. Try the drive on another PC, or on a Promise controller(if you have one handy), and see if you get the same results. I've had drives that actually benchmark faster on the inside when running off the motherboard...

The jet airliner analogy is wrong. Consider that a hard drive head is moving at about 80 mph relative to the platter when on the outer rim of a 7200 RPM hard disk, and is "flying" at a height of perhaps 1 um. A more accurate analogy would be an airliner flying at 7 um, or 0.00028", since the...

Couldn't happen to a better person. What was his great accomplishment anyway? Cutting costs by firing people? Any moron can do that. A good CEO should focus on increasing revenue, not cutting costs. I'm thinking that perhap we should have a new national pastime. Let's stop hunting deer(why...

I agree that healthcare and retirement costs are two major employer expenses that cannot be eliminated except by laying off the employees. That being said, if I had a choice continuing my job with no health care coverage or losing it, I would certainly choose the former. I'm not that thrilled...

Glad to hear you were spared the axe-this time. :o I've often thought that layoffs are a silly way to cut costs. Short term you save but long term you often pay in customer dissatisfaction. This of course assumes that those laid off weren't dead wood to start with. Nothing wrong with...

It's not a good way to get rid of heat, either. The thermal conductivity of Peltier modules, even when short-circuited, is rather poor(as it must to achieve even their rather poor efficiency as refrigerators), so this increases the thermal gradient necessary to get rid of a given amount of...

I was thinking of how colors are displaying on the monitor, so you might be right. They probably get millions of colors by dithering the three basic colors and black at 2880 dpi so that the eye doesn't notice(plus the colors will always blend slightly before they dry, further hiding the "dot"...

Another remote possibility is that the device is using a heat pipe. A heat pipe is a vapor filled tube which has very high thermal conductivity. By using one you can remove heat from a cramped space where a large heatsink/fan won't fit, and move it somewhere else where you get rid of it. You...

Actually, it would be 3 bytes per dot, not bits, and for an 8" x 10" photo at 2880 dpi that would be 1,990,656,000 bytes that need to be sent to the printer in raw mode. Since USB maxes out at around 1 Mbyte/sec, in 3.5 minutes you can only send about 210 MBytes to the printer, so I would...

If they are using a conventional Peltier, then it is correct that you would need a 120W or so device to cool an 80W processor. To keep it at 26° C you would need to keep the hot side of the Peltier at around 50° C. The Peltier would be drawing about 110 to 120 watts(the wattage rating of a...

Putting aside the incident with the dog getting shot, this slob is not someone I would care to have for a neighbor, and there must be some legal means of forcing him to keep his property in order. Piles of dung and rotting animal carcasses are of no concern if your nearest neighbor is a mile...

Having just experienced the pain of losing a beloved pet myself, I'm glad to hear that Ida survived, but sad to hear that she'll likely be maimed for life due to this idiot's stupidity. It is beyond me how anyone can shoot at something(animal or human) unless their life is threatened, and that...

I don't know about anyone else here, but I'm perfectly comfortable using either system of measurements, and converting between them. For example, it wouldn't bother me if a vehicle speedometer was reading in mph, km/hr, m/sec, or knots. Right off the top of my head, I know that a posted 65 mph...

Thank you all for the heartfelt sentiments. I was initially hesitant about starting this topic since I wasn't sure of the kind of reaction it would generate, but I see now that many here also feel losing a beloved animal is no different than losing a human family member. The feeling of loss is...

If it can be done, I would like the ability to edit posts for a limited time(say 10 minutes) after initially posting. This is mainly to correct grammatical and spelling errors that you only seem to notice right after you hit the submit button.

You could try the old freezer trick. Keep the drive in the freezer a few hours, and then try it. Of course, you must somehow protect the drive from condensation while you're doing so. A variation of this worked for me recently. I had a friend's drive that refused to autoconfigure, and put it...

I haven't done extensive testing yet. The driver doesn't seem to have much effect when the DOS version of Norton Disk Doctor is running, but this is a hopelessly bloated program, and much of the directory scanning appears to be processor intensive. The older version of Disk Doctor that came...

As some of you may have noticed, I haven't posted here or on SR in the last 2+ weeks. This has been due to first the illness and then the death of my cat, Tiger. I recently wrote something about her life that I wish to share with everyone here. Also, if anyone has some space on their site...

I know it's a little late, but thanks for the nomination, Mark. I had a death in the family so I've been out out the loop as far as SR and SF goes for the last two weeks.

Thanks for the tip. Believe it or not, I was finally able to dig something up. I found out on one site that something called the Trione V. 3.60 DMA driver would do what I wanted, but wasn't able to find it. A few days ago, I did find it at...

That sounds like an even better punishment to me. Maybe have repeat offenders caned and knouted. :mrgrn:

Yes, I'm aware that there are legitimate uses to send e-mail that way, but perhaps ISPs should restrict that ability only to clients who have provided proof that they are a legitimate business/newsletter. There is no reason to allow that ability across the board. Regular ISP accounts should...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't preventing people from sending multiple messages at the same time prevent or at least limit SPAM? If a spammer had to individually send the SPAM to every addressee, there wouldn't be enough hours in the day to reach any significant number of people, and the...

:roll: I really hope this was supposed to be a joke. Why not use a hammer while you're at it? :mrgrn:

Looking at the maintainence schedule for typical lasers, it is likely that the only consumable the average home user will need to replace are the toner cartridges. Most of the rest of the items are scheduled for 20,000 pages and up. Assuming you use the printer for 5 years, that's 11 pages per...

I know that. :) I wrote a semi-serious response anyway just to see what kind of feedback it would get. I have nothing against upgrading, but only if it offers me functionality I need, bug fixes, greater stability, or any combination thereof. I never upgrade just because a new version exists...

I'll take that as a compliment. :) I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who feels that way about XP. I'll see if I can pick up a legal copy of Win2000 on eBay. In truth, I would like to try it, maybe just with a test partition in a dual boot configuration as timwhit suggested. I'm just not...