sutton050

Its that time, I have been maxing out my machine repeatedly, I had two options upgrade or build new. Money determined that an upgrade is all I can afford, between the server rebuild earlier in the year, building myself a new rack-mount table and just generally being skint my budget was low, super low, like £200. Lets go over what the machine is.... I'm running an Intel Core i7 950 3.0ghz.  This is a four core (eight thread) chip, it cost the earth when I bought it as an early adopter of the newly released Core i7 series.  My upgrade comes in the form of an Intel Xeon X5670, clocked slightly slower I do plan to overclock the chip, but it lifts me to 6 cores (12 threads).  There's also a whopping increase in L3 cache, I see this as the last and only upgrade path for this machine. The motherboard hosting this is a very trusty Asus P6X58-e, I've loved every minute of this board, and hope that applying the overclock will be as easy as everything else working with it. As I am o...

In the 1990's it was common to have to tell folks not to use "popular" password, like "sex", or "god", believe it or not even "password" and "secret".  Since then times have moved on, folks have become very adept at using other characters in their passwords... Unfortunately, this is (very seriously) what one of our IT bods here has just found on a machine: Props to the user for mixing in some numbers, a word and a symbol, however... We can all see the flaw in their storing the password. (Thanks to our IT Manager for letting me use his picture - it is a lovely left hand, I wonder if he does hand modelling?)

I recently ordered a new WD Blue disk, it duly arrived and had the strangest problem I've seen in many a long year, no matter what I did the disk showed as 64MB total and it lost all data upon power cycling. I puzzled over this briefly, until I pulled the disk back out the caddy and saw it had exactly 64MB of cache, yes, no platter space was being shown, just the cache showing up as disk space.  I have never ever seen this before, cache has always been a transparent intermediary for me in production and so to suddenly have the cache being the only exposed space was odd. However, dead on arrival hard disk, a quick RMA and a new one winged its way into my hands, they actually gave me a slight upgrade as I got a WD Black by return of post. Tonight I planned an hour to fit the new disk and add it to my workstation.... This machine has no cable management, and its a nightmare to add drives, there are six built in 3.5" bays but they have a set latch and screw mechanism, which forces...

The new home server build starts with the case, I've elected to go with my wallet, and this means the cheapests ATX case with the mode drive bays... The Coolmaster N300 comes in at just over £38 and sports an impressive 8 internal 3.5" drives.

It has been a while since I've brought to you the tales of woe from my past... But this one isn't a tale of woe for myself, it was some other poor bugger who had to suffer, though I was involved. After my first in-depth IT related job, I got into looking after some big systems, and I mean so Big they could have starred Tom Hanks... The last one of which ended, officially in early 2001, this was my looking after an IBM AS400 machine. It had several terminals hooked into it, many suited analysts (as the non-programmers were called) regally sipped coffee and generated reports from it, there were also several ASCII Serial wireless hand-held terminals for roaming about the site with, all pretty cool.  I however was not involved in any of this, my job was to look after the PC's on the site and keep the AS400 fed with back-up tapes. One of the PC's however took me within a solar breath of the chorona of glory that was working with the BIG IRON, and this was a little IBM PC, ru...