Hardware for Wrath

[Mordekhuul]

I'll second the opinion that it's probably the RAM. I had similar issues recently when I was swapping memory back and forth in various boards to figure out what was broken (turned out to b the new MB). I had moved DDR2-800 ram into a board that normally has 667 in it, and I had manually changed the speed to 800 to test it (the MB didn't auto-select 800 for some reason). When I put the slower memory back in, I forgot to change the settings back to match. The machine would boot (usually) to the XP login screen, then either freeze or reboot when you tried to log in. Sometimes it would actually let me log in and start to do stuff, then reboot.

If the disk you were using worked in the old machine, I find it very unlikely that it would cause this kind of issue in the new box.

Good to hear. I'll try RAM first.

A techie working at Fry's last night was telling me that he understood hard drives sometimes didnt like having a fresh install of windows put in when an old one used to be there, even after reformatting it - like some remnents of the old install would mess with the new one. Sounded kind of fishy to me, but I'll throw it out there in case there is some veracity to the tale.

My drive had XP Pro on it before, and is now getting a fresh install of XP Pro SP3 (once I get the system to stop freezing up mid-install, that is).

[Mordekhuul]

It must have been the hard drive or the RAM, because I just went ahead and replaced both to bring things fully up to date, and I'm now up and running! Woot!

Here's a summary I posted for my guild:

I finished my XP installation, installed drivers for my NVIDIA 8600 GTS card, installed firefox, and am just taking a moment to say that I'll be back in the world (of warcraft) soon enough!

All told, I salvaged (from my previous machine):

500W PSU
NVIDIA GEFORCE 8600 GTS video card
DVD/CDROM drive
SB Audigy II sound card

Newly Aquired and Installed:

Gigabyte S-Series GA-EP45-DS3LR/DS3L Motherboard
intel Core 2 Duo E8500 dual-core CPU
New (standard, cheap) case
Seagate 3.5" Barracuda 500GB HDD (7200 RPM, 32 MB Cache)
4 GB (2 x 2GB) Corsair PC6400 800 MHz DDR2 memory
Windows XP Professional (OEM copy)

Yay.

Much thanks to everyone here for the inspiration to upgrade in the first place, and the suggestions as I ran into issues.

As a side-note...what the hell am I going to do with 500 GB of disk space? It was the smallest, cheapest decent HDD they carried at my local Fry's Electronics =)

[Concillian]

As a side-note...what the hell am I going to do with 500 GB of disk space? It was the smallest, cheapest decent HDD they carried at my local Fry's Electronics =)

If you're like me... you buy a standard definition digital camcorder that uses flash and you take a bunch of video of your baby. Since it's SD and on flash, it requires nothing special, you just copy the files to your computer and start filling space =P.

Of course, my file server drives are only 320GB, but I have 3 of them (one primary, one a bootable backup that's updated nightly, one an external backup that I bring home from work ~once a month to keep an offsite backup in case of fire.) I don't like the idea of losing my files.

[Kevin]

As a side-note...what the hell am I going to do with 500 GB of disk space? It was the smallest, cheapest decent HDD they carried at my local Fry's Electronics =)

Do you have to ask? What is the internet for? (Original Song and of course WoW version) Just download and fill er up! :)


Oh come on you knew someone was going to say it. :)

Edit: You can get a clip from the Avenue Q website as well since folks still tend to ask where the song came from.

[RTM]

As a side-note...what the hell am I going to do with 500 GB of disk space? It was the smallest, cheapest decent HDD they carried at my local Fry's Electronics =)

I thought that about the 10gb drive I bought for $200 back in the day, too.:) You start ripping your movies or set up a media center to record some TV and it'll fill up real fast. Or home movies, yeah.

[NiteFox]

I thought that about the 10gb drive I bought for $200 back in the day, too.:) You start ripping your movies or set up a media center to record some TV and it'll fill up real fast. Or home movies, yeah.

Same here. I had a 2GB drive at the time, and bought a 10GB one as a second drive. I remember saying that I could do a full install with every game I owned and still have space.

And I was right. How times change.

[LavCat]

Of course, my file server drives are only 320GB, but I have 3 of them (one primary, one a bootable backup that's updated nightly, one an external backup that I bring home from work ~once a month to keep an offsite backup in case of fire.) I don't like the idea of losing my files.

What hardware/software do you use for the "bootable backup that's updated nightly"?

[Concillian]

What hardware/software do you use for the "bootable backup that's updated nightly"?

I use a fileserver that uses the lowest power setup I had on hand (because it's on all the time) this was a server board with an old S939 3000+ (single core 1.8GHz). It has integrated graphics. I tested with one of those crappy Kill-a-Watt things and it says it uses 50W just sitting there, so that's not too bad to have running full time.

It runs Linux, currently Ubuntu 8.something LTS. Whatever was current when I re-did the drives a few months ago.

Attach 2nd hard drive with at least as much capacity in your favorite way (USB, SATA, PATA)

DD the first drive to the second
use rsync on a cron job every night to make incremental backups.

It takes like 30 minutes of going through man pages to find the right flags for DD and rsync and your have bootable backups for life. DD is sort of like Ghost. It makes a full bit by bit backup of a partition. This makes the second drive 100% identical to the first (and therefore bootable). rsync does differential backups so it doesn't take nearly as long as DD to do backups. The cron job runs it when I'm least likely to be using my computers (3:30 am)

I look at what's necessary to do the same thing on a Windows machine, and I just cannot possibly imagine ever doing that on a Windows machine. First you have to buy Ghost, then you have to buy some kind of software to do something the OS should be able to do by itself. These two pieces of software probably each cost as much as the drives you're backing up because they're generally for corporate use.

It should be possible in OS X too. I don't know macs at all, but it should be pretty easy to setup with OS X.

[Klaus]

First you have to buy Ghost, then you have to buy some kind of software to do something the OS should be able to do by itself.

I have Ghost on my windows machines. I set it up to make full images once a week, and incrementals each night. These are made directly over the network to the filesever. What were you referring to for the second piece of software?

Ghost is annoying expensive ($70 a license), but it doesn't expire (use it year after year unless you want to upgrade) and it actually saved my butt once (disk in the notebook computer died, and as soon as I had a replacement for the hardware, I was back to where I was when it went belly up). You can also use it to migrate your OS from one disk to another if you're just changing hardware because you want to for whatever reason.