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Well.. got my Spec assignment back. Boy oh boy.. did pretty well, except for the fact that some of those answers were wrong! It's annoying to be marked wrong when the answers they are using are somewhat off the mark. Another thing that happened to me tonight. While I was running a few fits (hopefully a few FINAL fits) for Rb2, something happened. I had no idea what. I came back from dinner (after missing the CTRL-A meeting - DOH!) and checked on the progress of my job after I had logged in and it had apparently finished.. right in the middle of a calculation. This doesn't usually happen unless there was a crash, in which case I would have seen the core lying around (4 MB files are hard to miss). No dice. Finally, I just ran the thing again just to see what happens. Well, after coming back from Spec, I found the job had finished with the following error message:
Disk Full.
Good lord, we had one odd GB of free space last time I checked (about a month ago). So I check to make sure.. sure enough, the drive was full, and a quick check showed that HW had 1.7 Gigs (of the 4.2 Gig drive) filled. What the.. that's one THIRD of the hard drive!! (And we had more than three people on that disk). Pain in the..
Oh well, decided to get rid of some of those "extra" files I had lying around so that I can get that danged job done. Now I have an excuse to do some surfing.
Speaking of which, found out that ABit has gotten new drivers out for their BH6 mobo.
Also, speaking of motherboards and computers and the like, I should tell you a story of "the putting together of my computer"..
It all started last night after I got back from school.. I wanted to put my computer together so that I can update my accounts and finally try out Half-Life: Day One. Well, I put the thermal grease (Heat sink compound as weirDo would say) and stuck the celery stick to the heatsink/fan. Plugged the whole shebang into the mobo and stuffed in my brand spanking new Diamond Monster Sound MX300, and Millennium G200. Ripped out the floppy and hard drive from my old (and trusty) Pentium 133, and hit the switch.
Nothing happened.
After a bit of fiddling around with the cables, I figured out that the power cable from the box to the board was loose. I rammed it in and fired it up again. The power came on, the fans started blowing.. and the screen remained blank.
What the heck?? Well, I started fiddling around with it a bit more.. then I got HNT (The computer guy) to help me out. Said it probably was a grounding problem. Tried ripping out all non essentials, sound card, network card, decorative moose head.. no luck. Brought the whole darned thing down to his lab (in the basement) and checked each component. CPU.. check. Memory.. check. Video card.. check. What the heck? Could it be the motherboard?? Boy oh boy.. unscrewed the mobo.. pulled out the little tiny (insulating) washers, and put the board back in.. and it worked like a charm. "We got a pulse!" Damn I felt dumb.
Thanked HNT and went back up to put in the rest of my new gear. Hard drive, Video card, Audio card, Network card.. what the.. doesn't recognize the hard drive huh? We'll see about that..
An hour later..
ChuckL came by and asked if I was finished yet. I groaned. He mentioned that I could use the automatic hard drive detection thing. It worked. After banging my head against the wall, HNT came back and started installing the peripherals. Win 95 started and detected everything.. that's nice. Asked for drivers.. put in CD. CD ROM doesn't work.
*sigh*
Not my day. Takes another 15 minutes to install the secondary IDE controller. Finally.. install the mobo drivers, Video drivers (and switch from the yucky low colour low res to something palatable), Sound drivers, Network drivers, things seem to finally get on track.. Oh.. why not install Bus Mastering? (Sure, why not?). Installed Bus Mastering and rebooted. Computer reboots. Okay, where did the CD ROM go this time??
Took us another half an hour uninstalling and reinstalling the IDE controllers/Bus Master before they decided to coexist. Now it was time to set up the Network card so that I could download the latest driver. Done. Reboot. Oh.. lookee here, the computer detected a new device.. looks like the network card. (Funny, I thought that it had already installed)
Find out that the network card has managed to uninstall itself ($#!^ Windows). Reinstalled network card.. rebooted. Network card not installed. It took another half an hour of massaging the computer before it allowed us to install the network card.
Finally, got the thing to work. Took another half an hour to download the drivers and install them. Took another 15 minutes to get rid of all the old drivers for my trusty Trident video card and (now unsupported) GUS PnP. When I finally got Half-Life running, it was already 1:30.. in the morning. Six hours after starting this darned project..
And to think that weirDo took half an hour, while ChuckL took just as long.
I definitely don't have the silicon finger.
Oh well, sucks to be me. But the agony and pain is finally over! My computer works like a charm, OC'ed to 450, and I couldn't be happier! (Course, if we actually had a working network in the house..)
That's enough for now, I'm gonna go home now.
