I’ve decided that the PVR box simply wasn’t up to the specification needed to run it successfully. Therefore, I’ve removed the TV card, and put it in Beastbits.

This does mean a couple of things.

It means that I can switch out the 60Gb drive in Beastbits, and replace it with the 120Gb drive in the PVR box. I’ll need to find a way of being able to clone an NTFS partition and restore it onto a bigger partition….

Ironically, as disk space was getting so critical yesterday, I actually attempted to write using the old drive. It only bloody worked. Wrote 10 DVD’s on the trot. “You bastard”, I thought, with its smug, flashing LED. Grrrr.

Either way, the drive was on its way, and it arrived this morning.

Hooked it all up, and I must admit to making some childish errors during the installation. I totally forgot to check the jumper settings. It was factory set as slave. That’s a bit silly, I must say. But even then, I should have checked.

I did get a weird error message on bootup though. One I hadn’t seen before.

“Secondary IDE channel no 80 conductor cable installed”

But what did it mean? It means that I’m using an old-style ATA cable. I never even thought the problem could be that the cable is an old standard, but apparently, it is. I’ll obtain an ATA133 cable from somewhere, and try it, and obviously, the results will go on here.

Ignore the other messages on there, I’ve forgotten to plug in the keyboard when I reconnected, (childish mistake #2) and accidentally knocked the power cable out of the floppy drive (childish mistake #3)

Stupidly, even though the drive is a retail box, this LiteOn drive doesn’t ship with a compatible IDE cable. Neither did it come with any media. So, forgive me if I’m wrong, but this is a RETAIL BOX, that you buy out of a shop, and you get home, wanting to piss around buying stuff straight away. Does it let you do it? Ha! Does it fuck. No cable, no media. Tchoh. Luckily, I’d bought 3 spindles of blank disks, and have thankfully recovered some of the disk-space worries BB was experiencing.

The drive itself is NOISY. Very noisy. Much noisier than the Plextor it replaced.

Extra cooling was also added - I replaced the case fan which so unceremoniously died. Well, I ripped the wires off one night when it got too noisy. I also gave the CPU fan more of a spring clean. “What ingenious device did you use?” I hear you wail with delight.

Half a biro, and lung power. The amount of dust blown off it was incredible. It feels much cooler yet again.

Stats of the DVD writer, 4 burned disks, 0 failures. First 3 were Ritek branded 4X’s. The other one was an orange label 8x Bulkpaq.

Adding the DVD writer actually caused XP to flip out, and require reactivation. All of the changes to the system I’ve made over the last 6 months, and it’s never asked me that. Still, it went smoothly. Yay for unpirated XP CD’s!

You may remember I wrote about the heatsink being clogged with filth, and that I couldn’t do anything for any period of time without it croaking.

Fixed it! Using the wonderful tools of my mouth, and the ripped-off corner of a phone bill.

Once again, it crashed while I wasn’t doing anything particularly CPU intensive - IRC and Winamp. That was it. So, I checked the temperature… 78 degrees. Ergh. Something had to be done.

So I powered off.

Using the piece of paper, I scraped as much of the dust off as I could. Due to the position and angle of fan blades, things such as toothbrushes are out of the question for this task. But a carefully placed piece of paper got in there just fine. The remainder was just simply removed by blowing it.

As soon as I powered on, I could feel the draught coming out of the side of the heatsink. Hadn’t felt that for a while!

So, onto MAME, previously my arch nemesis. Played through a game, and expected it to cop out halfway through. Nope. After completing said game (oh, I’m such a pro), I rebooted, and noticed that the temperature was down to 68 degrees!! Not ideal, no, but it’s 10 degrees cooler under load. That’s quite remarkable, as David Coleman would say.

Naturally, I wouldn’t recommend using this technique, but am I FOOK going to pay £6.99 for a can of compressed air.