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Archive for the ‘Technical’ Category

For techys I found this which I found quite helpful- its very much written with eircom in mind but most of the info can be applied generically as to how it works.

http://www.jeacle.ie/pub/articles/adsl/

Upgraded my PC to an AMD Athlon 64 x2 4600+. Never expected a dramatic improvement in performance but have been well impressed witht he difference its made in BF2142-  Much less lag- no doubt about it.

However a weird thing has happened on the back of it. I use a program called Grabit, a free nzb downloader for pullin gin newsgroups stuff. Its worked fine for years but since the CPU swap it runs for a minute or so then the TCP stack , or the NIC hardware simply dies.

I can’t ping round my LAN, or off my machine-Its not like my LAN is hammered by the downloads- never more than 2%-3% utilisation. I tried pushin gmy NIC hard- and achieved 40-50% utlisation for a sustained period no problems, but not with Grabit!

There seems to be a thread on the grabit website forum abou a similar issue but why it should start with a new CPU has me totally confused!

To get it back working I have to disable then re- eneable my NIC in Control Panel.

Found a really useful website- especially valuable for gamers who want to be sure they have shut down as much unneeded junk as possible before playing on their PC.

The site is ProcessLibrary.com and it contains a useful download which attaches itself to your Task Manager allowing you to directly access info on the web about any proces sliste din the Task manager.

Highly recommended.

I was due an update to my AV update subscription on my main PC ( I try to keep it as legit as possible). As Norton 2004 was out of date now I decided to update to System Works Premium 2006.
Downloaded and installed it in about 20 mins all in, fine.

It installs by default a program called GoBack which is designed to protect your PC from crashes by imaging your boot area and system file sinto a hidden partition.

All seemed OK for a few days then my PC would not boot. It said it could not find C:\windows\system32\config\system\
I initiated GoBack by rebooting and hitting spacebar, and went back on restore point- up came the PC. Next day same issue, next day OK then next day same again.
I was suspecting GoBack as the culprit and had by then discovered another annoying fault with Norton so emailed tech support and I mentioned my system uses SATA RAID0. They gave me a lis tof pretty standard trouble shooting stuff to identify which other program(not theirs) was causing my problems and so I could remove them!) Not very satisfactory when its been stable for a couple of years.

Yesterday I suffered a bit of a crash and it screwed up
 my Dreamweaver instalation and once sorted I decided to take a precautionary back up which failed. I decided to resolve today- withthe intention of removing GoBack.
It knew I was coming as my system categorically failed to reboot- I have tried EVERYTHING, I even went out and bought a pair of SATA disks and added a second raid array, my board supports dual arrays. This installed but could not see my main disks. NIGHTMARE,  I really needed to get my data off the system as I am working on a web project that involves a lot of work to date programming, and I have some critical file sin there too belonging to other people (who incidentally have suffered a crash and are needing the files now!)

After all day fighting with it I phoned Symantecs tech support (£18 aa call but I got it for free as they acknowledged the issue)
It turns out they don’t support RAID systems though it never came up with any problem at install (I think its supposed to) They gave me a utility to unhook the GoBack and repair the Master Boot Record) Neither are relaxing procedures to carry out.
At least the system rebooted which really surprised me.

Watch out for this if you are a Norton user!