Probably not something that will make it to anybody’s desktop anytime soon, but it’s still pretty cool. A group of Italian overclocking enthusiasts have managed to get a P4 631 up to 8 GHz! Naturally there was a little bit of extreme cooling going on in the form of liquid nitrogen and some hardware modifications to the voltage regulators. There’s only a benchmark of some fractal calculations at 8 GHz, so I don’t know how much performance increase there was going up to that speed. Pretty moot anyway because I doubt anybody would want to rig up a machine that required continuous cryogenic coolling to run. Still a very impressive OC
Found at Slashdot.
Tape to tape 2: Cooking with smoke now!
Our home-built, cobbled-together-from-scrounged-parts data recovery service has reached a significant milestone. After much wrangling with SCSI cards and bad cables, we finally managed to bring up a Fedora 6 box with two LTO tape drives attached to it. Both drives were high voltage differential SCSI, which meant we needed to dig up an appropriate SCSI card. Managed to find one being sold through Amazon Marketplace and picked it up for $15 with shipping. Card worked fine. Ended up spending several days messing with various combinations of LTO drives and cables before getting something to work.
Now the system is up and running and both drives are recognized by the system. Hoping dd(1) would be all I needed to create a copy of the original tape, I put in
dd if=/dev/st0 of=/dev/st1 bs=256k
10 seconds later, I got a message that a whopping 240 bytes were copied from one tape to the other.
Crap. So much for the simple solution. I’m guessing I’m missing something that’s not letting me see the rest of the data on the tape.
But at least it works! The data in that 240 bytes seems to indicate that it’s some kind of tape header. Now I just have to figure out how to get to the rest of the data on the tape.
So much for the battery
While the battery in my laptop hasn’t quite burst into flames yet, it looks like at least a few cells in it have gone bad. After just over two years, the once mighty laptop battery that used to be able to carry me through at least 4 hours of work and equipment testing now drops down to 7% within a few minutes of unplugging it from the wall.
Kinda puts a serious damper on mobility.
A new one from Dell is $170 while a refurb from Dell is $115. Time to go figure out who to talk to at work to see about getting a new battery.
Computer ressurection
Well, after trying various permuations of IDE interfaces, cables and drive connections, it seems the boot drive doesn’t like it when anything is connected to the secondary IDE interface on the motherboard. Very odd. Doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with the secondary channel because the boot drive is detected fine when I put it there. Whenever I have the boot drive on the primary and something on the secondary the system refuses to detect anything on either IDE channel.
Good thing for the IDE card I stuck in the computer a couple of years back or I’d have to give up the CD and DVD burners on the secondary channel. With a bit of creative wiring and a tiny bit of cable stretching, I was able to take the optical drives I had on the secondary and plug them into the IDE card.
Everything booted up just fine and all was good once again.
I guess it’s time to start thinking about replacing the computer soon. Purchased it 5 years ago right before 9/11 happened (the suspension of air traffic for the few days afterward delayed shipping of the computer). I’d been planning on upgrading the CPU with a Powerleap PL-P4N and matching CPU to nearly double the processing power from 1.5 GHz to 2.6 or 2.8 GHz. Now with this latest finickyness (can I use that word?) I’m thinking maybe we should bite the bullet and go with a full system replacement instead. The way our budget is currently, it’ll be at least 6 months before we can think about budgeting for a new system
Just one more thing to work in I guess.
Save the hard drive!
Uh oh, the boot drive on the computer at home has decided to disappear. I don’t know if it was something I did when I put in a new DVD drive, or if it just happened to be a coincidence. BIOS claims there’s nothing attached to any of the on-board IDE channels, so it’s either a problem with the cabling, the drive or the motherboard is pooched. Computer POSTs fine, so I don’t think it’s the motherboard. I may have knocked something loose putting in the drive.
Time to crack the case open again and check things out.