Thanks to one of the lads at work, I’ve managed to update Beastbits’s video card from a Geforce 4 to an FX 5200.

The reason I bought the GF4 in the first place, was to set up a PVR machine. Sadly, I became lazy, and abandoned the project in favour of setting up the Windowcam. Over the weekend, I decided to abandon the idea of a windowcam, in favour of something more useful. First it was just going to be a media server, so all of my music, etc. can rest on there. But, I got the video card, and I thought I might as well make use of the TV capture card, and the currently redundant GF4.

So, I’ll be clearing the machine of all of the Windowcam images, and seeing if I can get my hands on some decent software.

Bungle spontaneously rebooted on Sunday, losing the fantastic uptime it once had. Never mind, eh?

Technorati Tags: beastbits, computer, geforce, nividia, video card

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!

Beastbits got a new HDD and caddy fitted. Oh what a carry on.

Received the parcel this morning. Realised I’d forgotten to order a SATA cable. Great start. So I had to get one from in town.

Fitting the HDD in the caddy was a piece of piss. And much easier than I thought it was going to be… exactly why I thought it was going to be difficult escapes me. But fitting the caddy to the case turned out to be a laughing matter.

Pushed it in first, and noticed it would only go half way. That was interesting. Why?

I examined around the case edge, in case there was something stopping it. And then I discovered what WAS stopping it… the motherboard, of all things. What a stupidly designed case.

So, I placed it in the slot above. And the power lead wouldn’t reach it. So at the minute, I’m left with the caddy sticking out of the case, with the motherboard stopping it moving any further. Not sure what can be done for that.

Now, time to attempt the data cable. What could be difficult about that, I thought? Famous last words. Two large capacitors on the TV card were blocking it. The first one was in use. So out comes the telly card. Too early to say if it’ll find a home in another machine.

The whole network got an upgrade, going from the 10Mb/s restriction the old hub had, to 100Mb/s. Definitely noticeable, and makes VNC pretty decent.

Technorati Tags: beastbits, caddy, hdd, new, sata