Last week, on Vets Day at about 2 PM my time, there was a power strike at the servers. We lost 1 gig of memory on one server. I bought some more to put in, and it just came in. I will try to do that tonight; if not, tomorrow.
The site will be down 5-10 minutes during this process.
FWIW, BCDB/Forum runs now on 2 gig, will go to 4. The MySQL server has 8 Gigs in it. The image server has 2, now 1... will go to 3.
No, a bit more technical than that... they sent DDR 2 PC-5300 RAM. The existing RAM in the server was DDR2 PC-3000 RAM. Even with the old RAM completely pulled, it would not recognize the new RAM at all.
Strange, too, because I use Crucial. It is a bit more, but I think the quality is worth it. I used the Crucial RAM finder (because I do not know what uses what off the top of my head!), and got what Crucial said it used... but it did not work. I noticed that PC-5300 is the lowest they carry; they do not have any PC-4000 or PC-3000 at all on their site. I may have to go somewhere else. But, strangely, the PC-3000 in there now IS from Crucial!
Thank you for contacting us. The PC2-3200 400MHz DDR2 memory is no longer manufactured. Because of this, we are now selling the faster speed parts for the system since memory is backwards compatible. We do have a note on this system that says make sure you have the latest BIOS before upgrading the memory. Please check with Dells website about the BIOS update. If this doesn't resolve the issue and you would still like to return the parts, please visit the following link...
It get's even more fun. Dell has the bios upgrade available on their site. Cool. But it must be installed from a bootable floppy. The only problem is that the Dell SC 1425's do NOT have floppy drives....
I don't envy you guys on the PC side. It's down right painful! Too many cooks in the kitchen for my computer needs. I run XP through boot camp and it's unbelievable how difficult it is to get all the software and hardware components in line just to run an application. More specifically Universal Remote software. I feel like tinkling on Bill Gates!
I run XP through boot camp and it's unbelievable how difficult it is to get all the software and hardware components in line just to run an application.
I run XP on my MacBook using Parallels to jockey between the two OS's. It can be a little pokey, but Boot Camp doesn't even enter the picture and the Parallels interface is very stable. It's also the route I use to upload my toon screen grabs to appear inline. I can't do that from the Mac OS (for whatever reason).
P.S.: Does Bill Gates have anything to do with the day-to-day at Microsoft anymore?
P.P.S.: Dave… good luck!
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"If it's hot, don't sit on it." —NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg
(This post was edited by mreiof on Nov 19, 2008, 6:31 PM)
M, you missed my point as I should been more obvious about it, sorry. Parallels is pretty stable, if you do BASIC Windoze stuff. Try hooking up a USB cable and programming a remote with URC(universal remote) software? It just doesn't work, so I have to use BootCamp for the drivers to engage! Even the 4.0 version that released on Tues, which I paid for and downloaded, and it still doesn't work.
I don't know where Bill Gates is with MS, but he's the dork that sold this crap to billions of people some twenty years ago thinking that it's the best, when indeed it's the worst. The only reason people use PC, is because they don't know any better. However, there are some that must use Winblows because of specific applications that only run on Windhose, but that's just another reason to kick Bill in the ding-a-ling!
My best friend has been tittering on getting a Mac but his work has specific software that requires him to use XP. I'm not about to recommend getting a Mac, then installing parallels which doesn't run with my specific software application. So for now, BootCamp is pretty darn good.
OK, here is my update. It gets a bit technical, so I expect to see some glazed eyes out there!
So Wednesday night I tried with a bootable USB key, with all the files I needed on it. I get down there, boot into BIOS. Unfortunately, the current bios will only allow booting from hard drive or CD-Rom.
OK, so replan for Thursday. I get a bootable diagnostics from Dell. Unfortunately, they lock down the .iso file so you cannot write to it. So this does not work because it has to boot into a DOS/WINDOWS environment and have the bios upgrade on the source disk. I went down anyway last night, and tried to fudge things... but I cannot.
So I got home last night and Google became my friend. I looked up "Windows Boot CD BIOS upgrade" and found a bootable CD image that allows you to put in a BIOS file. I burned that and tested it this morning on my laptop. It booted, and the file I needed was there!
So I am ready to try again tonight! I think this will work- now I only have to worry that the BIOS image I am upgrading to is the correct one...
RE Parallel- I use that on my iMac. Seems to work pretty good for Vista (problems are more Vista than Parallels). There are some things I just cannot do in OS X, at least not easily. (I know that flies in the face of that OS X is supposed to be... but I NEED a good, secure telnet method to administer the servers for this site, and OS X just does not cut it!) Plus, I have a lot of legacy Win progs that I am not ready to rebuy (or don't exist) for OS X (Secure FTP clients for one).
I have been considering the new Macbook Pro (again with Parallels for those "special" programs"), and I love the new unibody one. But it has a horrible screen. I cannot see spending that much money for a low res glossy screen (the MBP is 1400 pixels, my 5 year old HP has a 1680 pixel screen).
Well, good news. Tonight, I was downtown anyway, so I took my new boot disk and gave it a whirl. IT WORKED. So by 9 PM, BCDB has doubled RAM up to 4 Gigs, and images is from 2 to 3 gigs.
I spent the weekend tuning things a bit more. I upgraded the DataBase server to the newest version... but had some problems. That caused an approx. 2 hour outage Saturday night. My bad. But since then, I have upgraded various other softwares on the front end and Database servers, and that all seems to have worked fine.
