computer support, pc tricks and tips

Still a great game !

resident evil 4

Testing a USB to ethernet adapter, using it you can connect to a network via a USB slot, its rubbish 2 to 3 MB per sec transfer rate

Just finished a most excellent series of audio books.

Simon R Greens, Nightside.

Its about a hard Boiled detective who works a place called Nightside, a shadowy magical realm parallel to the real world, where all kinds of fantastical people and things dwell.

Combines scifi, fantasy and the detective genre very well its funny too.

hmm I was shock to find out how my pc costs run…
http://pchelpmate.net/?p=248

I was going to run my main pc, which uses 300 watts idle, thanks to the GPU a 9800 GX2. As a NAS server.

This is because my nas server broke and I didnt want to lay out money for the parts to get it running again.

But then I checked how much it will cost to run 300 watts 24/7 each month.

My my horror and dismay, I found the cost to be 30 pounds a month (42 dollars)

Needless to say Ive ordered the parts for the NAS server now.

Use this calculator to check how much your pc is costing you.

Want a pc to have two or more network names?
http://pchelpmate.net/?p=191

I recenty tested using windows spanned volumes I wrote about it on my blog, http://pchelpmate.net/?p=201

I recently created a spanned volume using two hard disks a 450 gb and a 700 gb, creating a single 1.1 Terabyte volume visible as a drive in windows.

In the past I’ve been very wary of spanned disks due to comments I’ve read in various forums.

Spanned volumes can join multiple disks together so they appear as a single drive in windows.

Please note that the disks used for spanned volumes have to be empty and converted to dynamic disks and NO other operating system uses dynamic disks, so getting them to work in other OS’s will require a work around if its possible at all. (it can be done in Linux)

Though it must be said if one disk in the spanned volume dies the whole spanned volume dies, and any remaining disks not are not accessible though the file system.

However if a disk or disks are temporary missing for some reason, the volume will reappear in windows as soon as as all disks in the volume are working again.

With spanned volumes the data is written the first disk in the volume until its full and then the next and so on.
This means you can recover data left on disks from a failed spanned volume.

I tested this by breaking a spanned volume and seeing if I could recover any data, from the individual disks even though they where not accessible by the windows file system.

I tried several data recovery programs, Getdataback worked the best, recovering all 450 gb of data. that I used to test the spanned volume.

Though it took a day to recover all the the data. using a mid range pc (core 2 duo e6600), using the on-board disk controller.

All in all in my opinion there’s no reason not to use spanned volumes as long you have good data recovery software and the time to use it.

Though personally I think creating a spanned volume of more than a couple Terabytes, is not a good idea.

Unless you have a full backup, or don’t mind waiting days to recover data

Performance wise I found no drawbacks using a spanned volume.

I tried file transfers on each disk formatted as individual primary partitions and then as one spanned volume and there was no difference in file transfer speed.

This neat registry hack enables one a extra network name to a windows pc.

This is very useful when your replacing a server, you can keep its networking shares the same during the servers downtime

Just put its data disks in another pc and add the downed server’s name as a alias.

Open regedit and make these changes the registry.

Hive: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

Key: SYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesLanmanServerParameters

Name: OptionalNames

Type: REG_SZ

Value: “aliasyouwant”

Source Create an alias name for a Windows NT server..

Very useful, this program will create a entry in send to menu, in the right click menu.

That will upload any file (under 20mb) to Virustotal

The file will then be scanned by Virustotal which uses 39 virus scanner engines to check the file for malware.