So it's time for a new Amelia: An Acer Travelmate 4202.

Amelia Mk 1, bought a year ago, is a Celeron M 1.4, with 256MB of memory (which I upgraded out of my own pocket) and a 40GB drive (likewise).

Amelia Mk 2, bought today, is a Core Duo 1.66 (not Core 2 Duo; I'm on a budget) with 512MB of memory (I'll add another gig) and a 120GB drive. And a DVD burner, something Mk 1 lacks.

It cost just $100 more, and I could have done better if I'd ordered from a company I'd never heard of in Brisbane or Melbourne. Somehow, no-one in Sydney is selling it cheap.

Also, it has an 8-cell battery with a claimed 5-hour life. It only lasted a little over 4 hours in the review I found, but since Amelia Mk 1 is currently doing well if it lasts 30 minutes, I'll take it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:02 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I just configured Samba and dropped 60GB of AVIs on it. I want to see if the crashes were purely a hardware problem or a hardware+driver issue. I was never able to make the box crash except by transferring huge amounts of data over the network, so it's fundamentally sound otherwise.

Which is good, because it's about to get a lot of work to do.

And speaking of stress tests, I just downloaded Picasa and said "Index this!" I did make it easier by archiving 600,000 images during the big backup, so we'll see how it goes.

Update: Martina seems to be working fine. I copied files back and forth until I got bored, without a hiccup.

Picasa, on the other hand, locked up after a couple of hours. My boss is a huge fan of Picasa, but I don't use it. I couldn't remember why, exactly, but I seemed to recall that last time I tried it, it spent a couple of hours indexing my drives before freezing solid. Google don't seem to have fixed that bit.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:38 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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It may well be legitimate; the company I was ordering from turns out to be based in Romania with an office in the states.

And if they had PayPal, I'd have no problem sending them my $99.

But give them my credit card? No.

Hmm. They do accept PayPal; they just don't have it in their online form. Alrighty then!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:50 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Dude, you just knocked the power cord out.

Doh.

Useful piece of information: With the Noontec Blue-Eye cases, the power light remains on and the USB hub still works even if you knock the power cord out. So check the power cord first, then panic.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:03 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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As I thought, it's pretty much gone to the big rust farm in the sky. It comes up fine, but if you try to do anything serious with it like actually reading the data, it's not long before it stops responding and Windows freezes up.

But now, now I just reach over and turn it off, and Windows is like, oh, your USB device has gone away, and everything comes back to life.

So now I can recover critical information like my AMV.org password...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:20 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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It works.

Which means no 7600GT for Pixy, but also means that I can wait for this nice X1950Pro card to reach Australia.

And that's if a game comes out that I actually want to play. Well, I'll probably get Neverwinter Nights 2 eventually, even if it's widely agreed that it sucks. It can't be as bad as Temple of Elemental Evil, and I bought that. Never played more than half an hour of it, but I bought it.

* On my shirt.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:34 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Replaced my nice speedy GeForce 6600GT with my emergency backup card (a Radeon 9200), and I'm back in business.

It's a pretty slow card - a quarter the speed of what I had - but it works.

If I can't get the 6600GT to work again, I think I'll pick up a 7600GS to replace it. Or maybe an X1650Pro.

I'd like a card with dual DVI ports, but there aren't any*, because video card manufacturers are dicks.

* In decent AGP cards under A$500, that is.** If I was looking at PCI-E, I'd have no problems. But I'm not. Bah.

** Well, there's this, but it's not actually available yet, so it doesn't count.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:25 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I ran memtest86 on Martina*, the FRUDSed Linux box, overnight without any errors. Then I restarted the backup (yay for rsync) and after a few more gigabytes it crashed again. And again. And again. And again. Best effort between crashes was 13GB; worst so far was 3.

So I said, buggre alle thiss, and actually logged into it and wrote a little script to repeatedly md5sum 30GB of bzipped Usenet data. It's just completed its fifth pass.

If it's not memory, and apparently not the CPU, and not the disks or the controller, that only leaves one thing in the chain. One thing that is very easy to replace. As soon as I find one.

* Lina, Naga, Amelia and Sylphiel already being taken.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:57 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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This is one of the first mainstream anime series about incest — here, a romantic relationship between siblings — to be widely marketed in the U.S.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:37 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:19 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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