lishikawa

I agree that newegg is a very reputable dealer. I've also found good deals in fry's/outpost, and tiger direct. But lately, I'm more concerned about noise then performance. (My buddies will kill me for saying that!) You can also search through www.pricewatch.com. But be careful with the 'LE' versions. But don't use pricewatch unless you know EXACTLY what you want. If you do decide to go down this path, make sure you lookup the company's ratings at www.resellerratings.com and click on 'store ratings'. Some stores have cheap prices, but have horrible return/re-stocking fee policies as well as delivery problems. (NOTE: You should also try to buy everything from 1 place to save the hassle.) -LI

There is a difference betwen LAN games and WAN games. Since I do lots of online games I can help you here. (Cough cough... Can I make it to a TWL this Friday? My clan isn't too happy I'm missing it!). I remember killing many nights playing Diablo2 with my friends trying to collect all the rare collection items. The realy problem is whether an online game's protocol supports NAT traversion. NAT is Native Address Translation where 1 ip address in the 'world' is internally shared by multiple machines with different ip addresses in the LAN. You systems will have ip addresses of say 192.168.1.x. But when the systems inside the LAN makes request to the outside they are all coming from 1 ip address. The question here is does Blizzard games support NAT traversion and the answer is following: "Warcraft III is the only Blizzard Title that currently supports multiple players hosting games behind NAT. " http://www.blizzard.com/support/?id=msi0445p So don't bother. Port Forwarding, DMZ, and all the other stuff won't matter. The answer is if your kids want to play diablo 1/2 in multiplayer mode in LAN mode it's OK. But in the online mode only 1 person can connect at any time. Many games support gamespy and seemeplayme as the protocol. I know that the older Microsoft online game service also did not support NAT traversion. So next time you are not sure, look up the title's support and search for 'NAT'. If you kids wants to play together but can't be in the same room, I recommend using either Ventrillo, or teamspeak. The latter is more popular with game clans who have the server up 24/7. (I'm actually on one right now talking to my buddies). Ventrillo has substantially better sound quality. But it also eats more CPU, according to some. Consider using voip chat technology as that is what hardcore gamers and clans use to coordinate together. Connecting HUB to the DSL/Cable Modem will 99% of the time will not work because each device only supports 1 ip address. And be cautious about hooking up a hub to it because it typically recognizes the mac address of the first device, and will only allow that device to talk until it's powered off/on. In some cases, though not as often as it used to be in the late 90's, it will require you to call the support to 'reset' the modem. Good Luck! Leigh

There really is no easy answer. Years ago central point made an ISA based board that could duplicate floppies and read mac floppies. I think I threw it out recently because I don't have systems with ISA anymore! I found the following tools, but I am not certain whether they work, or how good they are. 1. http://www.emulators.com/download.htm (30 day trial) 2. http://www.macdisk.com/mden.php3 (pay) As for the floppy drive, the mac and pc floppy drives are pretty much identical. Years ago Sony was the leading 3.5" floppy drive maker and provided the drive to Mac. Now a days there are tons of drives from various manufactures like Teac, and Mitsui (along with others). I can't say 100% if all floppy drives are the same but you could always purchase a usb floppy drive that supports windows and mac. And many macs no longer have floppy drive built in. It's an USB add-on and chances are your mac buddies will sneer and spit at you for even thinking about floppies. If you were my friend, I'd copy the files using my mac mini and my usb floppy drive. (It's the best web server ever! Only if I can compile teamspeak on it...) Oh, and I have a backup floppy drive just in case my bios fries... But when something can read it for a while and starts to fail, I tend to be question the media itself. But it never hurts to try the free stuff first... Leigh

I worked for a backup company. The most reliable storage device is MO. (Magneto Optical). Shelf life easily exceeds 10 years. You can actually bake it in the oven at 350 degrees for an hour and it will still work. Some claim it will last 50 years but who knows?. This is the best and most reliable media and is often used by banks and other large security firms. MO was considered #1 most reliable. CD/DVD -> A little over a decade ago a company tested various cd's and said that average life span, not counting scrachtes is about 1000 reads. A good CD will last 5+ years. It all depends on the dye that is used. Cheaper medias have substantially shorter shelf life. (I've seen media die after <2 years). Trust me, I used to go through spindle of 100 cd's in a day when it used to cost $3 each. It's in the dye and expensive doesn't always mean better. It's hard for me to say who makes the best as I haven't used media to that degree in years. Tape - DLT and Beta (Okibono, which used to be used by the government, but I think they swapped back to DLT) has a typical guranteed shelf life of 10 years. Given proper conditions. (Low magnetic, balanced humidity, low temperature), you are talking much longer time frame. Hiring remote storage facilities like Iron Mountain, they will supposidly provide and ideal environment. Hard Disks - The media itself is pretty long as the platter is made from Aluminum or Glass. The problem is within the electrical mechanisms. Personally, I'd stay away from HD as a long term storage, unless you are talking about a RAID 5 solutions, such as EMC Symetric. Otherwise, stay away from HD due to cost, as well as technical issues. Which one? Well. Most companies go with DLT tapes. They have a good balance between cost/reliability/performance. But you are talking about ~$1500 for the drive, and around $50 for each tape and they contain roughly 20~40 gigs. (Some claim higher but that's based on hardware compression and that's questionable). For a large data collection at the cheapest cost, DVD would be the cheapest right now. But shelflife is ~5 years. Cheaper media can be less. For a smaller space, consider using something like a SONY MD player/recorder and use it to store files. Each 270meg cartridge is roughly $1.5. Granted it may seem expensive but trust me. Bake it in the oven at 200 degrees for 15 minutes, let it cool, then bank the media with a plastic mallet dozen times and shove it in the drive and tell me if it works. Try that with anything else. Make sure to pack it away in a good container and put it in a dark, dry (not super dry as that's static prone) room with a relatively low temperature. Good Luck! Leigh

First of all, you need to separate your LAN requirements from your WAN. But after that's said, you need someone who knows networking to help you. Here's what you need to start... For LAN... Your needs are small, but you will need to figure out your requirements for DHCP, DNS for basic internet stuff. DHCPs are often included with your router, but DNS will not. Windows domains? If so, you will need to setup a domain controllers. You can attach a printer directly into the pdc/bdc and use it as a printer server as well. E-mail? Do you want a simple e-mail server, or do you want exchange server? (Probably not worth the cost). Or even use external e-mail servers? (highly recommended). You want e-mails to be always there, so highly recommend external service unless you are super network savvy. For WAN... You need to setup a firewall. NAT is a basic firewall and you want something a bit more intelligent. SPI is OK. There are network appliance plug ins, but these will set you back couple of thousand. Many dot coms started with linux server. Where companies configured a firewall and limite the connection and make changes as needed. If you are linux savvy, then 2 nic cards, or some machines even come with 2 nic ports built in, and a software called guard-dog will take care of your firewalling needs. Then again, same as dhcp, dns, and print server can be resolved with that as well. Routers (internal): Hefty routers allows for things called VLANs, and diagnostic ports. Also there is a backbone badwidth limitation. In hefty HP procurves (we have several in our labs), you have 6-8 gigabits. But those are systems that costs few thousand when it's all said and done. So, I'd say skip it and buy a $200 16 port gigabit ethernet switch from anybody. You want all gigabit ports for scalability. I can't explain everything as what you are asking for is a lot more then what you think you are asking for. But be careful with who you hire. There are tons of people who think they know what they are doing, but are totally clueless. I know some, but not all as this isn't my main thing. Good Luck. L.

I'd agree with most of the above but... The major difference between the 3000 and 4000 series in the addition of agp/pci-e graphics port. If you do not see youself gaming, 3000 series may workout fine. Though remember that memory is shared and can cause some cpu contention. This is often visible with large memory hogging application like application server that's doing a heavy deployment. There is another option though. You can consider looking at PowerEdge 420sc. I have PE 400 as my main desktop(and 600 as well but another topic). The PE 420 is vritually identical to the 8000 series. If you don't care about the OS. (I have MAPS - MS Action Pack), and MVLS licenses from work and I usually hate Dell OS installs as they put tons of dell junk. (That's just me though). If you don't need a monitor, and just a plain vanilla box, consider that. Price of 420 SC base is like $270. With few upgrades, it'll end up around $400. You will need to buy memory from outside vendor and go with non-ECC to save money. Memory: 1 stick or 2? The newer intel chipsets support dual memory access if same size memory sticks are added in pairs. Thus, try to buy memory sticks in 2. If you only have 2 slots though, remember that you will need to throw/ebay those old ones. For most cases, 512megs should be more then ample. That said, I too have 1 gigs or more on my standing pc's, and main work laptop as well. For what you describe, 512meg seems enough to me. As for Floppy, the only benefit is flash recovery. I tend to flash the BIOS as soon as they come out. If you screw it up, you can restore it using a boot disk ONLY from FD controller. (Not USB). BIOS uses reserves core downloader which can recover out of major accidents. (Power spikes, etc). It's happened to me 2x in past 10 years. My floppy was $20, so I said why not? Good Luck.

Thanks. So the tech came in yesterday and swapped out the lcd and video card. He said that is an code is errorneous and everyone ignores it. Instead, a full gui diag should be executed instead! For the person who ran into the problem, s/he should get the diagnostic disk and run through the full gambit of tests to see what the real problems are... Good Luck!

Bruce, If you like VI, then I think you should seriously consider using cygwin. It's free and works on various versions of Windows. BUT... I'm sure you are used to vi, but have you considered using JEdit? It runs on Java and works on all platforms that support java. (http://www.jedit.org/) You should give it a serious try. The plug-in development is killer as well. Eclipse is way too heavy for day to day text edit use. I've convince everyone in the office to use JEdit for most of their needs. I have cygwin install on ALL my windows machines. Sure you can live without grep, find, more, and shell scripting, but how can you live without tail? Leigh

Long time ago, I used to be a lead tester for ARCServe Autloader. (I'm actually the guy who wrote the manual for the ARCServe NT autoloader, and designed the UI as well.) I also worked for guys who wrote BackupExec as a lead tester as well. WEll, enough of kissing my own you-know-what. I've noticed that technology hasn't changed much in many years so here's what I know. The answer is "It Depends" For a high end lots of data, but you don't need tons of tapes You will probably want a DLT autoloader. Tandberg has been around for a long time, and they will have high end stuff. (http://www.tandberg.com) DLT cartridges are designed to withstand a lot more then standard 4mm DAT cartridges. You can literally drove over it with your SUV, and have a fair chance of extracting data from it. Economical: You can go with 4mm dat solution. It is smaller, and is easier to carry around. Not to mention the cost of media is usually a lot less. (NOTE: Do not use DAT audio tapes! ). Most manufactures are perfectly fine. They are most likely all using drives made by SONY, or HP. If you are looking for large scale autoloader. (100+ tapes, with indexing, and multiple drives to backup several servers at once) I would go with Exabyte's 8mm solution. They make the best 'refrigerator box' that I've used. The drives are again mostly made by SONY. Software: I worked on both, and I like the device drivers on ARCServe better. Ones used in Backup Exec was written by Paul from IBM. (I wonder what he's doing), and he was a QIC expert. Their drivers are more consumer end, and I do not feel is better. This is truly neutral, even though I currently do work for CA-ugh right now. Good Luck!

Before you go on, I can give you few pointers. Most likely, your cable modem will have an ethernet port. Look at the modem, and see if there is a jack that looks like telephone. Easy test is to take a telephone cable, and plug it in. It should fit, but very loose. Don't worry, it won't break it. 2 suggestions based on your answers: If no then: Follow what people have said but... If Yes (I have the port), then 1. Do not go buy ethernet card and start internet sharing. because a. It requires 1 pc to be up at all times b. Your pc becomes vulnerable to attacks. c. Nightmare with firewall configurations, sharing and so foth. 2. All you have to do is buy a wifi ethernet card/router combo. They are often sold in the kits. Don't worry about setup as most of them come with a big fold out sheets that show you how to connect everything. 3. Follow the instructions as told but you need to continue. 4. Make sure you setup a WEP (security). This will encrypt your data. Any kid with a $20 card can a. hijack your router. b. hop on your network and start causing havoc. b. Packet sniff your network and see what you are doing - So read the instruction and setup a WEP (64 bit or 128 bit is both OK. Both of them can be broken with decent effort but it'll make them earn it.). 5. Plug your pc into the router. (You do not need to buy an ethernet cable as the kit should have one for the router to cable modem already). In most cases, it will take you 15 mins to do everything. Good Luck!

(I figured while I'm here, I mind as well put my 2 cents in) CRC errors typical occur during the validation after the drive write occurs. If you are seeing this during drive to drive copy, the first thing I would question are your cables. 1. If you are using anything faster then ATA33, I would check to make sure your HD cables are ATA33+ cables. (They are also known as 80 pin cables. The main difference is the grounding wire running between each cable. The concept is identical to SCSI cable vs. old ATA cables.). 2. Check to see if your cables are too long. Long cables are susceptible to noise. Though with ata33+ cables, this is less likely. If the above fails then: 1. Do a full disk scan. 2. Check BIOS of your system, and driver updates. If your system is newer then 4 years, these problems are unlikely. Good Luck!

This document is returned in the google search topic, so I am posting what I've learned today. I received the same exact error. I re-seated my memory, hd, and cd-rom and it didn't help so I called Dell. According to the dell tech (we have a gold package), the error code 1000-0146 only indicates that there are logged items in the hd. It DOES NOT MEAN THAT YOUR HD IS BAD. That said, I continued to execute the diagnostics, and discovered that the lcd/video card on my d800 was defective. Fortunately for me, we have a 3yr on-site warranty still in effect so Dell is coming out tomorrow to fix these problem(s). I also asked the rep if there is a way to extract out the dst log and the rep told me no. I am disappointed by the error code as it is mis-leading, nor does it tell me what it is. After a brief search, I can not find information on this right now. If I do find something, I will update this forum. Good Luck! Leigh