The Moan Thread

[vometia]

A week or two after receiving a pair of Velociraptor (now there's a word that doesn't lend itself to fast typing) drives, I finally summoned up the willpower to put them in my computer today.

I hate doing anything hardware related. It got off to a bad start because the bass thingy, you know, the big lump that's presumably the ".1" of "2.1" speaker systems was sat on top of it in such a way that the only way to get it off was to yank the computer out from under it and hope it didn't land on the floor with too much of a crash. Which it didn't, fortunately, but it's made by Creative Labs so I hate it for not breaking and giving me an excuse to get something better.

So I'd now wrenched the computer out and taken the panels and stuff off; fortunately that wasn't too tiresome since the case is fairly well designed. Can't remember by whom, it says "Osiris" but I think that's the model. But it does need some screwdrivering and of course of the handful of screwdrivers I'd randomly grabbed, none of them were the one I needed.

And so it continued. Amidst the tangle of wires I discovered I was short of one power connector, though fortunately I found a splitter among another tangle of wires. Then the first tangle of wires had to be reconnected, and, and... oh, it was all very tedious.

I'm done now, after several grazed knuckles, sore knees and a nose full of dust. What a lot of fun that wasn't. Still, at least I have lots of free high-speed storage for games so I don't have to worry too much about organising it any longer, or deleting anything or what have you. At least not until I fill that up too.

[washington]

Lol, Velociraptor is some kind of hardware? I already imagined that you got those Jurrasic park pests that would eat you in a week or sooner.

[vometia]

Lol, Velociraptor is some kind of hardware? I already imagined that you got those Jurrasic park pests that would eat you in a week or sooner.

They're hard drives for people who think that generic hard drives aren't expensive enough. Or more to the point they're quite fast hard drives, and as someone who hates stuttering, they're quite useful. Not that they completely banish the problem, but they do get rid of it a bit.

£200 apiece for 600GB is pretty steep though. I wondered more than once if it was really worth the money; but most of my bulky stuff I keep on my server which is a bit of a tribute to cheap storage.

As for the actual bitey things, I think Glaedr is the resident expert on that type of thing! Or at least their descendants.

[Nihternnes]

are those the 15k ones or the 10k Rpm ones because the 15k's are great but a budget killer

[vometia]

Erm... wanders off to look at receipt

10,000. I wondered why they seemed comparatively good value, but I'm not complaining since the performance will still be very good, especially as I have them mirrored (under ideal circumstances this could in theory double their throughput, though even if it doesn't, avoiding the chances of one of them dying on me and losing lots of data is worth it).

I still remember the days when our school had a 5MB (no, that's not a typo) hard drive for our network of BBC Micros. Or maybe it was 8. No idea what speed it was; about the same as a vinyl record, probably. In fact if you took it to bits I wouldn't be surprised to actually find a vinyl record lurking in there somewhere!

[Arthmoor]

I'm still waiting for SSDs to come down in price myself. Those have the most promise for the future. Nothing faster since an SSD is basically memory chips. No moving parts.

[donnato]

I hated when games went to discs over chips.I understand that there`s a price factor but...we pay in the form of glitches/wear factors.

[vometia]

Part of me thinks things will be less interesting with chip-based storage: there's something quaint about contrary electro-mechanical contraptions. I'm not saying it's a good sort of "quaint", but part of me seems to think so.

[donnato]

Like when we had to put tin foil on the tv antennas?

[Arthmoor]

So does that make me old if I remember having done that myself?

Also, on the subject of PC maintenance, don't neglect to do the occasional dusting inside the case. I've been a bad boy and went through half a can of air getting the crud out of my CPUs poor fan. It's a wonder the thing still works.

[vometia]

I'm not familiar with the foil on TV aerials and stuff. I do remember my parents having a black and white telly, though. And a "music centre".

As for dust in PCs, isn't that what makes them work? If you remove it, they often go wrong. A bit like what happens if you let the magic smoke escape, I suppose (for the naysayers, the magic smoke often escapes from CPUs if they get too hot, which is proof that it's what makes computers go: because once it's gone, they don't work any more).

[Arion]

When I'm cleaning mine out I take the fan off the CPU and use an old toothbrush to get the crud off the back of the fan blades and clean up the cooling vents on the heat sink before I use the old air can.

[Arthmoor]

Unfortunately if I were to remove the fan blades, it would allow the squirrels who run it to escape!

Or, probably just break something since they can't be pulled off.

[donnato]

Arthmoor...my chipmonks would like to meet your squirrels...Don`t know if it`s a good idea though...

[vometia]

I thought hamsters had the monopoly on powering computers and sundries including minor cable gnawing. I'm sure you'll be hearing from their union for this transgression.

[HeyYou]

Larger rodents are used on more powerful computers.