For whatever reason, I always like to get on Craig's List and look for free computer stuff. I rarely ever find anything (that I want), and I'm not sure I want anything, but I always look. It is some kind of addiction, I suppose, for there seems to be no rhyme or reason for it. It is just something I do.

So, imagine my surprise when I went to take the trash out at my own apartment building, there, right in front of me, on the ground in the trash room, was a computer tower, just waiting for a dumpster diver to rescue it from an ugly demise. I don't know what other conclusion I can draw from it being in the trash room than it being intended for disposal, so I grabbed it. I had to. It was a computer, it was there, I was there, and I was curious. And I'm a pack rat.

The computer looked kind of old, so I wasn't all that hopeful, but an old computer these days is better than anything I had back in 1984 (despite George Orwell's predictions), and it had a note on it that I am still unable to completely decipher, so I really had no choice but to bring it inside and plug it in. I was actually kind of surprised to discover that it worked! It booted right up into Windows 2000 Professional. And there was absolutely no data and really no applications to speak of installed on the drive.

It's actually kind of a mystery. Even though it was in the trash room, I feel kind of odd having it, as if I stole it or something. But last year I found an empty computer tower in the same trash room (and I found out who threw it out, and I know it was discarded), so I figured this must be on its way out, too (though I don't know if the trash guys would have even picked it up).
I was going to harvest the floppy drive out of it (since I am short one - though I'm not sure I even need one anymore) and possibly the hard drive, so I opened it up. The case is a very unusual design, but very functional - things swung open, making it easy to get the hard drive out, for example. It turns out this is an old Dell computer. But then I changed my mind and put everything back in. It is a totally working computer and would be fine for someone who just wants to get on the Internet or create documents, etc., etc. After all, it's a computer!

Something is wrong with this world when there are thousands of people who cannot even afford food or clothes - much less a roof over their heads - and here I am pulling perfectly good computers out of the trash. Something just seems so wrong about that. Therefore, I now have to make sure this computer goes to someone who could really use one and would really appreciate it. I can't believe there would be anything so wrong with it that it wouldn't work. I haven't tested it to see if I can plug it into the network. But it kills me that there is this computing device sitting on the floor of my workshop that has more computing power than the Apollo space craft. And it was in the trash.

Funny how people take technology for granted...and at the expense of the environment, too...but that's another story.

I just realized that this blog turned two years old this month. Wow. I didn't know if it would continue this long. I know there were a couple of times when I thought my computing days were over. But here I am.

Yesterday, and old friend of mine called me from out of the blue, looking for help with a computer problem. He was putting a system together with a new motherboard, and spent a couple of frustrating days trying to figure out why he couldn't get his board to recognize a SATA RAID array he was attempting to configure. To make a long story short, in the end it came down to hardware documentation.

Don't we all love technical manuals!

This poor guy had spent two days trying to figure out why the board wouldn't recognize the SATA RAID. As it turns out, the particular board he had - a Giga-Byte GA-8I945P-G - did not support SATA RAID configurations. It only supported IDE RAID. However, the GA-8I945P-PRO board does support SATA RAID. Of course, the marketing copy leads you to believe that the -G board supports it, too - after all, it supports 4 SATA drives, plus RAID 0 & 1, so you kind of draw the immediate conclusion that you can configure RAID on SATA drives.

The documentation doesn't help much, because it is written to cover the features of both the -G series and the -PRO series boards. And there is a little marker that indicates that certain features are only available on the PRO board. The real work is stripping out all the content that applies only to the PRO board to determine what's left. It turns out the -G board has an ICH7 south bridge, and the -PRO board has an ICH7R. We arrived at the conclusion that the R in ICH7R stands for RAID support, which seemed to be confirmed by the block diagram of the board, which showed the SATA drives directly attached. The IDE RAID, on the other hand, was supported by a separate IT8212 RAID controller, located on the PCI bus on the other side of the south bridge.

Anyway, my friend thanked me for shedding some light on the situation and he will be returning the board to the place where he bought it in exchange for something else. Most likely, a different board entirely. He has a video editing card he wants to install, but it has a lot of limitations about what chip sets it supports. It indicates it does not work in a system with an ICH6 southbridge, so we are suspicious that it will not work with the ICH7, either. I'll be looking forward to updates from him to see how his configuration progresses.

In the meantime, I am pulling computers out of the trash. I'll talk a bit about that and show some pictures in my next entry...when I can dig up some time. My next major task is to upgrade my wife's computer. Although, she's thinking of just replacing it all together if she can find a good deal with all the software she needs, included. I'll certainly report on that as things transpire.

FYI - The UPS has saved my butt a few times now! What a life saver that thing is - I should have installed one years ago! Oh, and I had an issue at work the other day. Apparently, the operating system decided it was time to install some updates in the middle of the night, unattended, regardless of the fact that I had a bunch of applications open and three unsaved files. I guess it figured I didn't care, because when I came back the next morning, nothing was running. In fact, one of the major applications on the computer simply no longer worked, so I have to troubleshoot that next week. Computers hate me. Am I alone in this?