Aquarium with electronic fish. aka Secret Project.

Not so long ago was browsing You Tube and stumbled across several videos showing an actual working PC inside aquarium filled with mineral oil. That exact second it hit me – Do want! Having tons of spare parts laying around the corners of my apartment It seemed fairly easy and inexpensive to build one.

Xbox 360 upgrade

Since the announcement of a new Xbox 360 at 2010 E3 wanted to lay my hands on one of these.
And finally grabbed one from Best Buy last night.

Photo everydations 2

Recently discovered this piece of old junk at work. Surprisingly it still powers on and functions perfectly fine.

How do you dispose your old Hard Drives?

There were times, when Hard Disk Drives were small and expensive. I do remember myself hogging megabytes of free space, burning CDs and DVDs. Now it’s much more convenient to buy a NAS and few 1.5 Terabyte HDDs, slap them on the network and forget about endless DVDs, for now…

On the other hand what to do with old Hard Drives? Crushing poor pies of electronics, putting an end to their misery, is always an option. But I came up with something more subtle and involving.

A modified picture frame from IKEA turns an old Hard Disk Drive into a fine tabletop decoration.

Next on the list is connecting some sort of 12v. battery pack and a button to spin the Hard Drive. Anyone has an idea on how to do it?

Tank is hovering on a new platform.

Well, it is true what people say: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again”. That was my case precisely. For couple of days I was fiddling with Windows 7 installation. Kid you not, I restored my Vista from backup at least dozen of times. I personally prefer Acronis True Image, as my Windows backup software, currently running version 2009. That piece of software is a real life saver, full 2 volume restore took least than 15 minutes and I was up and running with that retched Vista.

But, back to the Windows 7 install. After some time it became more than clear that the problem that I’m experiencing – is a hardware issue. One or several components are causing kernel halt, throwing off a Kernel-Power 0×8000000000000002 error. As it turned out to be the cause of the problem laid in BIOS , memory controller if to be exact. As I updated my Asus Crosshair’s BIOS to the latest version, tweaked memory timing a bit and with that all the bricks fell into place, and now I’m running a stable system.

As I started using “the 7″ I noticed a substantial performance gain, with a comparison to Vista. Windows are opening faster, copying files doesn’t take that much time any more, especially considering that my system drive is an SSD. Another issue popped up with network connection dropping while  under heavy load. For instance: using bit-torrent protocol transfer, watching You Tube. Any activity that opens multiple half-open connections will cause network to drop. Solution be – change half-open connection limit with TCPIP configuration tool, there are plenty out there in the internets. I used TCP-Z (TCP-Z Network Monitor), don’t really need to install the software, just the driver supplied with it.

Kind’a starting to get a hang of new Task Bar, still miss old XP-style Start menu. I’m pretty certain that this system will stay on my machine for a while.

UPDATE: Seems like the solution above doesn’t fork on all installations so tried another way, hopefully will work.
Disable the checkslum offload in Network adapter’s properties. I didn’t found checkslum, but i found a task offload, so decided to I disabled task instead of checkslum (Local Area Connection > Properties > Configure > Advanced > set Task Offload value off).

Not So Lucky Number Seven.

Recent hardware update on my mac went absolutely flawless. Besides little mix up with drive partitioning. As it turns out to be, if you plan to use Boot Camp for you Windows installation primary HDD absolutely has to be formated as a single Mac OS partition, and can be split up into several later on. Didn’t know that, had to reinstall. But still, using Time Machine is a breeze, complete restore took about 35 minutes.

Doesn’t it seem like allover sudden I start preaching Mac? Frankly saying I bought my Mac only a month ago, or so. Never even touched Mac OS  prior to that.

As far as Windows 7 Ultimate install went. Well, it didn’t went that far at all.

Tank’s Major Hardware and Software Upgrade.

A new 7.200rpm hard drive for MacBook Pro just arrived. Replaced the old one, restoring my system from backup right now.

The day before that Photoshop CS3 glitched and won’t reinstall, can’t live without it. So I decided to wipe major HDD on my desktop, kiss Vista good bye, and finally migrate to Windows 7. Will see how that will work out.