Sinfest

Dennis J. Squidbunny · Posted: Fri Sep 01, 2006 5:31 am Post subject:

One time I managed to riddle Joel's computer with virii which had nothing to do with me looking at pornography. He had almost managed to fix it and I went to make him a victory cup of tea forgetting that the kettle is plugged into the same circuit board as the computer which also happens to be the most dodgy circuit board in the house and the power shut off and then Joel almost killed me with a stool.
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WheelsOfConfusion · Joined: 09 Jul 2006 Posts: 11143 Location: Unknown Kaddath

kame · Joined: 11 Jul 2006 Posts: 2563 Location: Alba Nuadh

damn homonyms are fun. Smile

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cletusowns · Joined: 10 Jul 2006 Posts: 496 Location: Oak Park

The time when I lost not one but 2 IBM Deathstar harddrives at the same time.

I died a little inside when I lost all those mp3s
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CTrees · Joined: 21 Jul 2006 Posts: 3617

This is what RAID5 is for.

Though two hard drives at once? How'd you do that? Though I suppose if it was something like this, it'd be fairly understandable.

Usagi Miyamoto · Posted: Fri Sep 01, 2006 10:32 pm Post subject:

She
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Dro · Joined: 10 Jul 2006 Posts: 3830

I loved when video memory was part of regular old memory. With the Apple IIe, you could get the same effect if some data storage routine went nuts and filled up every bit of memory. Although it made it easy to play with the text screen. As a youngster I wrote a bit of assembler 6502 code that would search for every "l" and replace it with "/", every "/" and replace it with "-", then "\" then "|" and so on. It would also transform T to Y to V to Y to T. It would sit and execute 2 or 3 times a second, and animate the letters. It would also make the "."s fall to the bottom of the screen. I liked to start it going on different people's computers and watch them get a worried expression on their faces.

trustedfaith · Posted: Sat Sep 02, 2006 6:10 am Post subject:

Dusty · Joined: 10 Jul 2006 Posts: 650

Yorick · Joined: 11 Jul 2006 Posts: 12066 Location: Mary's kesh

Farore · Joined: 03 Sep 2006 Posts: 8

........

timmccloud · Posted: Mon Sep 04, 2006 2:21 am Post subject:

Windows 95. Sydney Australia. Two completely full 500mb hard disks using compression to squeeze every byte of space out ot them.

Now for some of you youngn's out there who have never had to deal with hard drives smaller than 80 gb's, you might not know how compression works, but in those days of FAT filesystems, if a file used 3 bytes, it took up an entire 1k block of the disk before the next file started (nobody cares nowadays with 100gb drives). When you enable compression, all of those empty spaces get filled with pieces of other files. And files are allowed to be partitioned into multiple parts, so one block of the disk might have hundreds of parts of files. Block sizes vary from disk drive to disk drive, but in this case I think it was about 512k.

BTW, I was a computer consultant at the time, living from contract to contract so I didn't have a lot of money, and my computer was my entire business.

Lightning storm.

Lightning strike on the powerlines outside the house.

COMPLETELY fried the surge protector, and the PC was ok, BUT...

It burned out the media for an entire block on both hard disks, where the head was at the exact second of the strike. It's the only explaination I have for having a single bad block on each disk after the strike, and perfectly clean disks beforehand.

Thousands of corrupt files with a bad block hole in them. Literally thousands of them. O/S files, data files, you name it.

I have since learned not to trust surge protectors as the only line of defense, but I also have electricians re-wire my abodes so there are surge fuses at the electrical panel as well.

Got a backup tape drive (they cost thousands in those days) with the next contract payment too.

Backup early and often. You have been warned.

(edit - spelling)
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Dusty · Joined: 10 Jul 2006 Posts: 650

you still have that back up tape drive? i'd like to see some pictures.
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Darqcyde · Posted: Mon Sep 04, 2006 6:13 am Post subject:

The first PC I owned was a Gateway2000 with a PentiumII 233Mhz w/ MMX. Anyone else remember what a disaster those things turned out to be? On top of that, I went through 2 mother boards, 2 hard drives, 3 CD-ROM drives, and a couple of graphics cards (all paid for under warranty) before I finally too it to the Gateway country store by me and guess what they said? Bad power supply Evil or Very Mad

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timmccloud · Posted: Mon Sep 04, 2006 4:34 pm Post subject: