Category: Geekery

That was relatively painless.

My Belkin router has needed rebooting twice in the last two weeks in order to restore wireless connectivity. I’ve experienced this before – I’ve had 4 or 5 routers before, and every one of them (except both Linksys, which were dead as soon as I got them) has, after a year or so, gotten to the point where it needs frequent rebooting. The rebooting gets more and more frequent, until eventually I give up and replace the damn thing.

For some strange reason, I decided to give Linksys another chance, but this time I decided to pay a few extra bucks and buy it from the local Staples. That way, if and when it craps out, I can take it back. Providing it behaves like every other Linksys I’ve bought, and is noticably faulty in the first 14 days.

I plugged it in, and set it up as a copy of the existing one. Even copied the MAC address. Unplugged the existing one, plugged this in, rebooted both the router and the cable modem, and the new router got the same IP as the old one had (thank goodness) and everything seemed to be working exactly the same. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Ok, which is it?

I got a spam from Verisign. I thought they were a legitmate business, so I have no idea why they’re spamming. Anyway, here’s the bit that annoyed me:

At VeriSign, we respect your privacy and we are continuously updating our mailing lists to make sure that only the people that want to receive VeriSign information are on our list. This will be the last mailing to you unless you respond to this email at this time.

and then later on in the same message

To remove yourself from receiving future VeriSign promotional
mailings, please visit us at http://www.verisign.com/compref
and update your communication preferences and user profile.

Notice the contradiction there?

Need a new graphics card

(Yeah, I know I haven’t been posting much. Mostly because the sort of stuff that’s bugging me right now doesn’t need to be shared with the entire web.)

I did the Ultimate Boot CD diagnostics that I wrote about in this previous post. And DFT said nothing was wrong with the drive, several memory and CPU testers found nothing wrong with either of them. And of course, I still have that message about the video card. So I’m thinking it’s almost certainly the video card.

I have an old ATI of some form or another in my desk drawer at work (I tried to give it to somebody there but he decided he wanted something with a driver disk and a manual). I think I’ll bung that in and give it a try, see if the system manages to stay up. If it does, I’ll try the old disk as well, to see if the problems with it were just a matter of needing a chkdisk or scandisk after all those power cycles. If that’s the case, I need to buy a decent but cheap AGP video card. My only two criteria are that it must be cheap (I think I mentioned that already) and it must give a decent frame rate in Half Life 2.

Hey, maybe this time it’s not the hard drive?

Or maybe it’s the hard drive and everything else at the same time.

My Windows box hasn’t been really happy since the move. And a few weeks ago, when I tried to start it up to test my new USB KVM switch, it started behaving badly. It was the first time I’d had it on in a while, and I was surprised that it suddenly rebooted, and while it was running chkdisk, it rebooted again. And again. And again. So I turned it off and forgot about it for a while.

Today I decided to try it again. I booted it with a Knoppix CD, and it managed to boot, and it could mount the hard disk. And I could navigate around. So I took my USB drive, and tried to copy files from the Windows drive to the USB drive. But it didn’t work – it got into the “My Desktop” part of the file system and Knoppix started talking about IDE errors and lost timer ticks.

So I grabbed another hard drive I had kicking around, and slapped it into the machine. There was a lot of dust in the machine, and I took it outside and blew it all off with my last can of “Blow Off Duster”. I booted it up and installed XP. It didn’t seem to want to get a DHCP address, but I gave it a static IP and started installing Windows Updates. But after downloading 17 updates and installing 3 of them, it rebooted with no warning. And when it came up, it said that Windows detected instability in the ATI Radeon graphic card driver. I pushed the resolution down to 1024×768 from 1280×1024, and blew off a bunch of dust in the graphics card heat sink. And it got a little further this time before it suddenly rebooted, and this time I saw a bunch of purple splotches on the display first.

So maybe it wasn’t the hard disk, and maybe it was the graphic card. Or maybe it was something else entirely. I’ve downloaded the Ultimate Boot CD and now I’m testing the drive and the memory and everything else. These tests run in text mode, so maybe they aren’t as demanding on the video card.

We’ll see.