Recent Posts

7226

General Software Discussion / Re: How do you backup your files?

« Last post by f0dder on April 25, 2007, 04:52 PM »

raid1 or none

(i'm serious)

-gjehle (April 25, 2007, 02:33 PM)

I'll have to agree with you... there's a lot of snobs that'll laugh and brag about their RAID5 setups, then go on about how onboard RAID solutions are bad (even for RAID1, although there's no compatibility problems there), and how expensive hardware is superior.


Well, the owner of that RAID5 wasn't very happy when it broke down. The pic is from oct 2003, those drives were expensive then. It broke badly enough that he couldn't just swap a drive, but would've had to buy enough new capacity to do a reconstruct-to-image.

7227

General Software Discussion / Re: How do you backup your files?

« Last post by f0dder on April 25, 2007, 07:15 AM »

I like the idea of incremental backups rather than "syncing" since you'll have a per-day (or whatever) copy of any file that's been modified... instead of having "important.doc" synced to the version where your cat jumped around on the keyboard. And doing full backups every day with a backlog isn't a possibility if you have massive datasets.

Acronis does it's disk imaging very well, and it's pre-windows-boot environment is really nice (and it works, despite of being linux based ) - supported NForce4 RAID, windows network shares, et cetera. Haven't tried doing a full image creation while windows is running, but it "might just work"

I'd choose Acronis over Ghost any day, especially considering the 'symantec' part.

7228

Living Room / Re: gmail slowing down??

« Last post by f0dder on April 25, 2007, 07:04 AM »

Doesn't your ISP offer a SMTP server? That tends to be the fastest and most reliable way of sending your mail, no matter where your pop3 is hosted.

7229

General Software Discussion / Re: How do you backup your files?

« Last post by f0dder on April 24, 2007, 04:57 PM »

I don't currently do any decent backing up. I haven't found any backup program I like (genie seems okay, but it's a bit too happy-fluffy and has too many popups and whatnot that I had to disable). My strategy when I still lived with my mum was a couple of batch files that did full or incremental RAR'ing of my source/documents partition to \\server\backup - obviously the server was left at my mum's place, so that doesn't work anymore.

I used to have a RAID mirror to avoid losing stuff because of a harddrive failure, but that's of course no replacement for doing backups!. And currently it's a stripe, since I wanted to play around a bit after I got my raptor drive. Unfortunately, I've managed to stuff a lot of data on the stripe, which I'll have to sort, burn out to DVDs and delete, before I can get back to mirror again. Yeah, I'm currently living my life on the edge

I plan to build a fileserver again sometime in the future, but I need to save up some cash first, and decide what to get - obviously power efficiency is a big concern here!. Until then, I do have some external USB disks though, that I should get into the habit of backing up to.

So, what's a decent no-nonsense backup program that's solid? Acronis file backup mode isn't exactly robust when it comes to aborting incremental backups etc., and it tends to include way too much in the incremental backups.

7230

Official Announcements / Re: Power Supply on my PC just exploded: i'll be mostly offline this week crying

« Last post by f0dder on April 24, 2007, 04:50 PM »

* f0dder does the happy hamster dance.

Thanks whatever deity that there wasn't any serious damage done.

Your advice of keeping spare components around is good, I have an old PSU that's sorta crappy and relatively underpower, but at least it could do for an emergency. Might also be possible to find a cheap PCI-Express (or even PCI - remidns me I need to phone a buddy and get my voodoo3 back) for those emergencies. But motherboards, cpu, ram? - that's spendy.

And my next upgrade (probably at least 6 months in the future?) will most likely be from AMD socket 939 to intel socket 775... unless AMD pulls as big a surprise on intel, as intel did on them with core2duo. But ok, at least one could hook up harddrives to the old AMD rig in an emergency... except that I'm going to donate it to my younger brother

7231

Living Room / Re: Help! PC hanging on first boot

« Last post by f0dder on April 24, 2007, 04:44 PM »

The (Antec) PSU that came with the Antec case I bought for a friend has one of those teeny-weeny connectors for measuring rpm speed, nifty enough. Can't remember if my own Antec PSU has one, I don't keep that kind of monitoring software running

12.5-12.9v does seem a bit excessive, I'm not too fond when there's more than 0.2v deviation from the specified voltage.

7232

General Software Discussion / Re: PKWARE, releases free SecureZIP

« Last post by f0dder on April 24, 2007, 04:42 AM »

Yup, and the link I got in my mail didn't work. Oh well.

7233

Official Announcements / Re: Power Supply on my PC just exploded: i'll be mostly offline this week crying

« Last post by f0dder on April 24, 2007, 03:41 AM »

   

How the hell can such a thing happen from blowing compressed air? Darn, I thought that was supposed to be safe >_<. Did the PSU literally explode, as in causing damage to other components? Or are you "just" afraid that it might have overjuiced the harddrives?

Crossing my fingers for you!

7234

General Software Discussion / Re: PKWARE, releases free SecureZIP

« Last post by f0dder on April 24, 2007, 03:38 AM »

If I needed to send a sensitive archive to someone, I'd go for RAR... better compression than ZIP, and it uses the standard (and secure!) AES algorithm.

But let's have a look at this SecureZIP thing, there might be more to it than just that.

EDIT: Well great, the download URL 404's.

7235

General Software Discussion / Re: Don't call it "the tray"!

« Last post by f0dder on April 24, 2007, 03:30 AM »

I thought google was against it's name being used as a verb...

http://arstechnica.c...st/20030620-162.html
http://news.bbc.co.u.../1/hi/uk/3006486.stm

7236

Living Room / Re: OMGLOLWTFBBQ! They set us up teh b0mbs!!11

« Last post by f0dder on April 23, 2007, 04:50 PM »

I wonder whether the Gibson part refers to the grc.com m****, or William Gibson who whote Count Zero etc...

7237

Living Room / Re: Gizmodo has gone too far...

« Last post by f0dder on April 23, 2007, 04:47 PM »

Haha, cute.

Google for realhamster if you haven't already seen it, btw.

7238

General Software Discussion / Re: Don't call it "the tray"!

« Last post by f0dder on April 23, 2007, 07:52 AM »

It's a shame to see that somebody writing on MSDN could be so out of touch. Maybe he could check the listing of files on just about every Windows machine on the planet, with minor variations: C:\WINDOWS\system32\systray.exe

-Cavalcader (April 22, 2007, 11:38 PM)

He already addresses systray.exe in TFA...

Btw I call it "the tray" myself, but I still believe that Raymond Chen has the right to be pedantic about these issue.

7239

Developer's Corner / Re: Windows Activation - When installing from an image

« Last post by f0dder on April 23, 2007, 07:44 AM »

Of course we dont activate the master! We only install it and our apps and setup preferences. Then image it and after the image is on the right pc we activate it. But nevertheless the 4-activation problem occurs.

-JoTo (April 23, 2007, 07:37 AM)

That might have something to do with the SID of the windows install, not being unique and all. Perhaps this tool will solve all your worries.

I'll google for your suggested thingies and study them. Hope unattended setup is as fast as writing an image and also so easy to build the setup as configuring the windows for the image.

-JoTo (April 23, 2007, 07:37 AM)

Unattended installs are nice, especially if you got varying hardware, but you don't get any apps installed... sysprep should be nice though, I think it's what Dell and friends use where you're prompted for user details (and possibly serial number) on first login, but then have a full working windows with preinstalled apps etc.

7240

Developer's Corner / Re: Windows Activation - When installing from an image

« Last post by f0dder on April 23, 2007, 07:26 AM »

For an imaging solution, I think you need some specific imaging software that supports changing the key - I wouldn't make an image of a windows that was already activated, and then try to change key after that, MS might think you're up to no good and eventually block keys >_<

If you were doing unattended setups instead of restoring from an image, I believe there's some kind of "answers file" where you can provide a list of {MAC, CDKEY} pairs (or something similar to that).

Alternatively, look up "deploy.chm" and "sysprep", which might be a viable solution. Never tried sysprep myself, but it supposedly works without corporate versions.

7241

General Software Discussion / Re: Firefox Extensions: Your favorite or most useful

« Last post by f0dder on April 22, 2007, 06:35 PM »

FasterFox only does prefetching if you have it turned on - and the other settings that it tweaks are useful... "persistent connections" is really great, and even decreases bandwidth usage by an extremely small amount . Apart from the prefetching, all the other settings fasterfox do can be tweaked manually though, iirc. Still more convenient having access to them through fasterfox imho.

7242

General Software Discussion / Re: Must-have apps in the System tray?

« Last post by f0dder on April 22, 2007, 04:08 PM »

I guess I should have added a MessageBox that says "done trimming"

7243

Developer's Corner / Re: 28.8k, 33.6k, and 56k Modem Emulator

« Last post by f0dder on April 22, 2007, 04:07 PM »

Haha, cute

7244

General Software Discussion / Re: Anybody know of a background traffic monitor?

« Last post by f0dder on April 22, 2007, 04:06 PM »

We've just recently had a somewhat related topic - perhaps that's of some help

7245

Living Room / Re: Laser Graffiti Video

« Last post by f0dder on April 22, 2007, 10:08 AM »

Wow, cool!

7246

Developer's Corner / Re: C# -- Help Needed -- Where is CRC.EXE - .NET SDK Installed

« Last post by f0dder on April 22, 2007, 10:03 AM »

kyrathaba: that's only if it hasn't been installed to a custom folder - better use the %windir% environment variable or read the install location from the registry.

SkyIDE: files should have been copied there while installing, not after reboot. But the built-in search thingy of Windows is annoying sometimes... like skipping certain folders depending on configuration options and such.

7247

General Software Discussion / Re: foobar...honestly...WTF?! WTF?!

« Last post by f0dder on April 22, 2007, 09:58 AM »

<3 Year Zero.

7248

Living Room / Re: Student Park: Flash Game of the Day

« Last post by f0dder on April 21, 2007, 06:01 PM »

Heh, this looks more or less like a complete rip-off of lemmings? Same actions you can do, first level is the same, etc?

7249

Living Room / Re: Help! PC hanging on first boot

« Last post by f0dder on April 21, 2007, 05:52 PM »

I'd start with testing all ram stick (ie., current config) - if that passes, you know it's not the ram. *if* that fails, you can test ram sticks (and sockets >_<) individually. But unplugging all unnecessary hardware is a good idea.

Just be careful about running it overnight - it's what you ought to do to stress things a bit, but if PSU fan is failing...

7250

General Software Discussion / Re: Network/application traffic inspection

« Last post by f0dder on April 21, 2007, 05:28 PM »

Hm, sounds suspicious.

Do you have any idea whether it's a massive amount of data, or just a small trickle every now and then? Perhaps your router offers some overview of bandwidth usage, or you could try some network meter thing?