Swear violently. Make your friends cringe at the verbal assauly at your poor, defenseless box. Feel better? Didn't think so. We all know that abusing your system won't get you anywhere. Maybe gaol if your neighbours call up to report a domestic, but usually, you'll just seekl the help of Dan the Man. And if you're in dire enough straits, you could bag a logitech MX500.
IOOTM: Mt Tattoo
I: After reading your article on Mt Rainier compatible drives in issue 19, I saved some dosh and bought a new CD-RW drive. It wasn't the Yamaha drive that you spoke of in the article; it's a Lite-On 48x12x48 drive with Mt Rainier support.
Now don't get me wrong, this new CD-RW drive is a wonder, but other than forcing the issue with a Stanley knife and a small amount of creative spirit, how do I get it to write those pretty pictures on the spare bits of my CDs?
Mark Newcombe
O:You don't.
The feature you're thinking of is Yamaha's annoyingly named 'DiscT@2', which can indeed burn patterns on the unused portions of a CD, but which isn't available in drives from any other manufacturer (yet). DiscT@2 and Mount Rainier support are two different things.
More info: www.yamahamultimedia.com/yec/tech/discta2_01.asp
Lazy drive
I: I have just bought a Gigabyte GA-8IHXP motherboard (Intel 850E chipset) and it won't cold boot properly. On a cold boot, it says that the Pri Master wasn't detected and then looks to boot off something else. However, if I then press reset, it will detect the Pri Master and boot properly. Any ideas how I can get it to cold boot properly?
Taggart Lidbury
O: It sounds as if you've got a hard drive that takes too long to spin up. The motherboard will only wait so long before looking at its drives; drives that haven't spun up yet won't be detected.
Many motherboards have a BIOS option that lets you change the boot delay, to allow for drives that take longer than usual to show up. I've flicked through the GA-8IHXP's manual, though, and I couldn't find such an option. So unless you want to trade in your hard drive (which doesn't necessarily have anything wrong with it, but which might have a lousy bearing or bad motor), you're going to have to put up with the double-start routine.
How long's a piece of string?
I: I have a P3 650MHz PC with 128MB of RAM, Intel 810 IGP and Win98SE and I am wondering if I should upgrade or not, and if so, what to. I would also like to know how long before I would need to upgrade again.
Andrew Williams
O: Well, gee, I don't know.
Is your computer too slow for what you want to do with it? Then upgrade. Do you keep running out of disk space? Is your hard drive flogging all day because you don't have enough physical RAM for the programs you run? Do you want to play new 3D games that want a bit more CPU power and a lot more 3D graphics speed than you've got?
Then upgrade. If you don't, don't. This is too open-ended a question; I can't give you a more concrete answer.
FireWire beats SATA?
I: About a year ago, I upgraded a laptop HD and placed the old drive in an external FireWire (IEEE 1394, whatever) case; I use it to move data to and from the office. Using W2K and a couple of $70 FireWire cards, this setup works beautifully and is truly hot-pluggable. An added bonus is that as 2.5in drives only require 5 volts, the drive is powered by the FireWire cable.
I have recently seen little 'FireWire bridgeboards' that turn an ATA drive into a FireWire device, without needing the entire external case. I'm guessing that a CD writer connected in this fashion would have fewer 'issues' that result in slow, or failed, writes, as occasionally occurs with the standard IDE connection.
Over the past couple of issues of Atomic, some of your writers have been getting understandably excited about Serial ATA, but I'm wondering if a decent 7200rpm ATA133 HD with a 2 or 8MB buffer and a FireWire bridgeboard might prove to be faster, neater and all around better than SATA.
Are my assumptions totally incorrect and deserving only of scorn and ridicule?
Stuart Cairns
O: FireWire conversion probably won't make a CD writer work any better. It's still running from an ATA interface, because that's all that it has; the ATA data's just being translated on the fly to FireWire. If anything, that'll give you more problems; the CD writer will get to be the only device on the ATA interface, but that's unlikely to have been a source of problems in the first place, unless you've been doing some quite serious drive-flogging while you burn your CDs. Even if you are flogging your drives, or doing something else that interrupts data flow to the CD writer enough that its buffer can't save it, modern CD writers can stop and resume writing (via 'Burnproof' or 'Seamless Link' or 'Just Link' or whatever your drive manufacturer calls it) without a problem.
Problems with CD writing, on current hardware, aren't actually very likely to have anything to do with the drive interface.
FireWire-converted ATA drives also can't be faster than the same drives on plain ATA, for two reasons.
First, there's the translation layer between IEEE 1394 and ATA. When all of the data has to be translated from one interface to another quite different one on the fly, it's not going to move any faster as a result. You might perhaps be able to see a small speed improvement with some really weird multi-drive simultaneous access stuff, but it'd depend on the bridge hardware, it'd only work for two or three drives at most, and it'd only be faster compared with those same few drives running two to a cable on ATA.
Then, there's bandwidth. The current theoretical peak bandwidth for FireWire is 400 megabits (not megabytes) per second; that's 50 million bytes per second, which is less than 48 real 1048576-byte megabytes per second (storage manufacturers continue to insist that a megabyte has one million bytes in it, because that makes their products look bigger and faster).
Fifty million bytes per second is quite unexciting compared with plain old Ultra DMA/66, let alone UDMA/100 or UDMA/133; UDMA/133 can theoretically move 133 million bytes per second (about 127 real megabytes). And then there's '150 megabyte per second' SATA, which is actually going to perform much the same as UDMA/133, if the data chain contains some parallel ATA components with SATA bridge hardware on it. Which, as I write this, probably will.
Large ATA drives these days can manage sustained transfer rates around 50 and 30 megabytes per second for reads and writes, respectively; peak bandwidth is never the same as actual user data bandwidth, but the large theoretical bandwidth advantage of the top-end ATA standards means that a regular two-connector UDMA/133 controller board or motherboard should be able to shift significantly more data than four 400Mb/s FireWire connectors (each connector on a FireWire controller has its own channel).
It should also be noted that if you want to boot a PC from FireWire, you're still pretty much certain to not be able to do it. All you need is a FireWire controller which your motherboard BIOS can recognise as a bootable device, but such controllers are virtually unknown, as I write this. Generally speaking, Macs can do it, but PCs can't.
Ape for APIC
I: I recently set up a system with an ABIT AT7 MAX mobo. The 'APIC' feature in the BIOS caught my attention. After doing a little research I found this is a standard for enabling the two IRQs needed for
Issue: 137 | June, 2012