madmat
Soup Nazi
I've been having a bad couple of days, well more correctly a string of bad days.
It all started when I was installing HL2, I got it installed and found it crashed my rig every time I attempted to run it, not good at all, it got worse with getting a virus by proxy from some scriptkiddie in yahoo chat (and I'm never in yahoo chat) via my sister since my pc acts as a gateway for our home network.
Then it reached a cresendo with my rig crashing every time it tried to use directdraw...and I figured out what was killing it after my 4th reload.
Last night I ripped my rig apart, cleaned out the dust bunnies and reseated my 6800 and yanked my modem. After I fired it back up it was fine (thank God) so now I'm back to the attack.
I did get one benefit out of all this, I finally pulled my W.D. SATA drives and engineered a little mod for them to reinforce the SATA sockets so that they're fully enclosed rather than open on the bottom side of the drive.
It involved taking a spare CDR and cutting two 1/4"x2&1/8" strips out of it, removing the reflective layer, scuffing the ends of it then scuffing the bottom of the SATA interface at the rear of the drive and applying some C.A. gel glue (superglue gel) to the scuffed areas on the drive and gluing the strips across the interface areas on the rear of the drive.
Anyone that has a W.D. SATA HDD will understand what I'm talking about since unlike Hitachi or Seagate or Maxtor which box the SATA interface in the W.D. drives have just two little tabs to help suppoer the SATA data and power cable plugs and the slightest torque applied to them will result in a broken tand on the female (socket) part of the plug which is potentially leathal to the drive.
I know this because I've broken not one but two drives this way which is why I sought a way to fix the problem before I had to fix one of my drives (again).
But happily enough I'm back up and running and nearly back up to date on my rig, it should be it's old self by this weekend.
It all started when I was installing HL2, I got it installed and found it crashed my rig every time I attempted to run it, not good at all, it got worse with getting a virus by proxy from some scriptkiddie in yahoo chat (and I'm never in yahoo chat) via my sister since my pc acts as a gateway for our home network.
Then it reached a cresendo with my rig crashing every time it tried to use directdraw...and I figured out what was killing it after my 4th reload.
Last night I ripped my rig apart, cleaned out the dust bunnies and reseated my 6800 and yanked my modem. After I fired it back up it was fine (thank God) so now I'm back to the attack.
I did get one benefit out of all this, I finally pulled my W.D. SATA drives and engineered a little mod for them to reinforce the SATA sockets so that they're fully enclosed rather than open on the bottom side of the drive.
It involved taking a spare CDR and cutting two 1/4"x2&1/8" strips out of it, removing the reflective layer, scuffing the ends of it then scuffing the bottom of the SATA interface at the rear of the drive and applying some C.A. gel glue (superglue gel) to the scuffed areas on the drive and gluing the strips across the interface areas on the rear of the drive.
Anyone that has a W.D. SATA HDD will understand what I'm talking about since unlike Hitachi or Seagate or Maxtor which box the SATA interface in the W.D. drives have just two little tabs to help suppoer the SATA data and power cable plugs and the slightest torque applied to them will result in a broken tand on the female (socket) part of the plug which is potentially leathal to the drive.
I know this because I've broken not one but two drives this way which is why I sought a way to fix the problem before I had to fix one of my drives (again).
But happily enough I'm back up and running and nearly back up to date on my rig, it should be it's old self by this weekend.
Last edited:
