Best Buy BlueShirt Meghan Ries and I had a chance to talk to Fox 8’s Wayne Dawson about the upcoming DTV transition.
Seagate Hard Drive Dies Firmware Death
I experienced the worst feeling a computer owner can have this week. I had turned on my computer and waited for the usual tones of the Windows Vista startup chimes, but was instead greeted with an error message from the motherboard stating that no startup disc could be found. A quick check through my system showed that the hard drive was powered on, but couldn’t be accessed by the motherboard.
Of course, later that day, I heard about the Seagate firmware bug that’s killing hard drives. Had I gotten word of this prior to the failure, I might have been able to load an update to resolve the issue, but currently my data is locked in the drive without access.
I tried contacting Seagate through their support line, but only ran into a message stating that there was a technical issue with their call system and to look at their website for support. Unfortunately, the support website was down as well.
Honestly, this incident, and the lack of information and support has turned me away from being a steady customer of Seagate drives.
Another Motherboard to Add to the Pile
Old AMD ATX Motherboard vs New Atom Mini ITX Motherboard
The old AMD socket 939 motherboard that my Ubuntu Linux file server was running on finally gave up the ghost last week. Because replacements are harder to find for older processors, I decided to try a different router and went with an Intel mini ITX motherboard and Atom 330 processor.
What’s neat is that the heat sink with the fan isn’t cooling the processor, but the northbridge chipset. The actual Atom 330 processor is underneath the fanless heatsink next to it, which tells you just how little power it’s using in comparison.
Mini ITX Motherboard Inside Case — Lots of Room to Grow
It’s amazing how small this little guy is, especially when compared to the motherboard it’s going to replace. I’d almost go as far as calling it “Mac mini” small. It’s pretty comical to see how much space there is surrounding it in the Rocketfish tower case I had for the box.
So far performance has been good, both from a file serving perspective, as well as trying out general desktop performance under Ubuntu.
Homeworld Revisited
Some feelings of gaming nostalgia over the holidays led me to reinstall the PC game Homeworld on my system this week.
For a game that’s nearly 10 years old, it holds up very well, and ran with little issue on my Vista 64-bit system.
The game has a great, epic feel, with haunting music and cinematic cut scenes, which made for a very satisfying play through. Although some critics originally complained about the slow pace of the game, I always loved the tension that came from huge space battleships firing volleys of laser death across the void at each other.
Happy New Year!
So now it’s finally the far flung future year twenty-oh-nine.
Where’s my nuclear powered flying cars and weekend rocket trips to the moon?