Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Computer Round-Up

Quite a bit has happened to my little farm of computers since I've moved to San Diego. For one all of them are running quite a bit hotter, this is mainly because I've moved from a downstairs apartment up to an upstairs one. This hasn't affected the computers too much, I'm hoping it stays that way.


First of all my main computer:



Friskett is now a 2.3Ghz Athlon64 with 3GB of ram and varying hard drive capacities. I had to scale down the overclock with the new ram. Even the semi-high quality corsair ram I got just couldn't clock high enough.

I resurrected my old parts and its now named "Boba". It breaks the Reboot naming convention, but Casey named it.



It features a 1.3Ghz Athlon Thunderbird with 256MB of ram. As a folding/file server it runs well. I replaced the annoyingly noisy heatsink fan with a much smaller, much weaker, much QUIETER fan. Its the fan that was installed when it was an 800mhz. The temperatures can reach up to 60C on a hot day in full load, but it seems to be fine.

Now for some work machines:

Keyhole



This computer I'm using temporarily for downloading software onto the DSP board i'm working with. My main machine runs linux and XP in VMWARE. That setup did not lend well to my serial communication needs. Thus I had to borrow this machine. While I'm using it I'm folding as well.

hcorelaptop



This is an ancient laptop that we'll be using for our radiation test. Currently I'm trying to get it straightened out, in regards to networking, namely it doesn't have any. Kelly actually has the exact same laptop, in better shape but with much much less ram.

Thursday, April 13, 2006

Matlab7 + AMD A64 = Hours of frustration

After hours and hours of time and countless re-installs I FINALLY got Matlab7 working on an Athlon64 processor. Basically this is the fix:

You have to create a few System Environment Variables.

To create those do this:

1. Right-Click "My Computer"
2. Go to Advanced
3. Go to Environment Variables
4. Click "New" in System Variables

Create these 2 variables:

Variable Value
BLAS_VERSION atlas_Athlon.dll
LANPACK_VERBOSITY 1

That should be it.

Sunday, January 29, 2006

300GB of Segate frustration

My experiences with Seagate have been somewhat poor. I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt and think of my experiences as abnormal, not representative of what a "normal" user would experience. My first experience with a drive purchased from them was back in 2004. After much searching, I found a 160GB Seagate UATA HD for a good price. I bought the last one Circuit City had in stock and happily took it home. It installed fine and formatted without problems (thought slowly). After a few days I put the drive through its paces, copying multi-gigabyte files to it. I started to get CRC errors. I ran a diagnostic and found that the drive was defective. Back to Circuit City it went.

It's now 2006 and I decided to give Seagate another shot. Bought a 300GB UATA HD from Fry's and installed it. This time I ran the diagnostics PRIOR to formatting or installing any software. It took a few hours but it tested fine. Formatting took all night (it's a 300GB HD after all). That's when the problems started happening.

1. Original XP Pro CD cannot handle hard drives of 127GB or higher. I need at least SP1 for that. I can't find my slipstreammed SP2 so I decide to use my Legit Sp1a CD. That seems to work until the first reboot. Then it errors out with "Error loading Operating System". By this point I'm getting apprehensive about the drive. But since I'd never actually installed XP using that CD before, I chalked it up as a fluke and decided to just create another slipstreammed SP2 CD.

2. Create another SP2 cd. Follow the directions online, burn cd, reboot. Error... Hmmm...

3. Create ANOTHER sp2 cd. Follow the directions online (find the step I skipped over last time), burn cd, reboot. Instal starts.

4. Choose partition, setup copies files, reboot... "Error loading operating system..." Crap.

5. Off to google. Find something about changing the addressing mode from "Auto" to "LBA". Try that and install goes through! (I also found an article that says to NOT use LBA and to use "Large" instead.

Install went off rather uneventfully after that problem. I'm not copying all 80+ gigs of data off my 100GB HD onto the 300GB HD. The 100GB HD will be handed down to my sister to replace her 40GB IBM Deathstar that died recently.