Computer « Suburban Adventure

RAM Reject

Our work computers run up against a performance barrier when running newer versions of our CAD setup so I figured I’d bring in some RAM as a temporary measure. I popped in the RAM and restarted and the computer ignored the new RAM. I popped out previous RAM, sawing through layers of dust that saw George [...]

Giant Monitor Homesickness

A coworker left and as is the sacred tradition of my workplace, we drew lots for his crap. I emerged with a 22″ monitor that most of my coworkers didn’t realize could be used in tandem with my existing one each computer in the CAD group has a double dual-link DVI-capable video card. I connected [...]

Server Survival Marathon

My 2 TB home server has been on the fritz and I’m convinced it’s getting Munchausen Syndrome. Somehow, the motherboard generates a wailing beep that doesn’t correspond to any normal beep code that’s only placated by rebooting. It then lost my backups (go entire point of the damn thing!) and corrupted my system backup. I’m not [...]

Stupid Work Filter

I wanted to test drive Firefox RC3 at work as the memory leaks had started to become problematic on my new old computer. I tried to get the American English version but the work filter blocked it as a Phishing Site so I downloaded and installed the British English version. I haven’t noticed any difference. I [...]

Selling a Computer

CIS 1055 is mercifully ending and today groups had to pitch sales to get people to buy specific computer configurations based on pre-defined criteria. After hearing the following
Picasa pronounced “piss-casa (Spanish for urine house)”, protege pronounced as “poor-teej” and people talking about bigger megahertz and one group actually using the word “interweb” I did my presentation. [...]

Don't talk about computers on company time… unless it's my computer

My computer hobbying has gotten around the office and co-workers have asked me a more than one computer question. Today, one of the engineers was asking me about upgrading his processor and as I told him what he’d have to do the engineer saw his manager coming over and quickly switched topics when the manager says [...]

16% is just the beginning

After playing a DVD back-up I made that skipped quite a bit, I’ve begun sifting through my back-ups to see which work and which don’t. Part way through, my free space was going down and discovered my drive hit 16% fragmented. This is the highest I’ve ever had a drive and like a moth to the [...]