I have been quite busy lately, but I managed to buy myself a RAID 6 system. I used to have a RAID 5 with 4 harddrives but I guess that’s just not secure enough. I am a lazy person, so I am sure that I won’t replace a broken hard disk immediately. With RAID 5, I would run into the problem of losing all my data as soon as a second hard disk fails. That’s why I decided to upgrade to an RAID 6, where 2 hard disk can fail.
Telekom, T-Com, T-Home or whatever they are calling themselves now is my ISP for VDSL 50. So if you have read my previous entries, you already know that it is not working as expected. First, my download rate is less than 20 Mbit, which is okay if you have VDSL 25, but not if you are paying € 10 more every month to get 50 Mbit. I’d be satisfied with 35-45 Mbit, but that’s not the speed I’m getting.
I finally have surround sound! After suffering way to long with the built-in stereo sound from the default drivers of Windows Vista, I am finally able to enjoy music on Computer again. I only own a Soundblaster Live! 5.1, which is really old, but still a very nice soundcard. But when Creative decided not to support the Live! Series under Windows Vista, I decided to never buy another Creative sound card again. I hope many of you do the same. Anyway, I wanted my 5.1 sound back on Vista, so what now? Luckily, I came across the kX Project on Driver Heaven. They have made their own Driver for the EMU10K1 chip, which is also used on the Soundblaster Live! Series. Their official download page is kind of old, but on the Driver Heaven forum, they have posted new drivers which work under Windows Vista just fine. I got the 3538m version, which worked perfectly after some configuring. Read more to see how to configure it for 5.1 sound.
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As some of you might know, I use a pair of 512MB Twinmos Twister Pro Dual Channel RAM. They’re not only the fastest DDR1 modules around, but they permit overclocking without voiding the warranty. Of course, they weren’t cheap when I bought them almost 2 years ago. Around last week, my computer started crashing and I ran memtest86. It showed me several errors during test 5. I couldn’t believe it, because I didn’t even overcloak those modules. Anyway, I wrote to Twinmos, asking about the “lifetime warranty”. And what response did I get? “We don’t give out warranty on these modules anymore”. WTF? These modules are not even 2 years old! It seems like the Twinmos lifetime warranty is limited by them to the time they are still producing the product. But actually, for those who bought the RAM later than me, they might not even had 1 year of warranty. What a rip-off!
Unbelievable, but my raid system crashed again! Only a few days after the last incident, the array broke again, taking the W2k3 Virtual Machine down with it. Right after I fixed it in the morning, it broke down again in the evening. I already played with the thoughts that my raid controller broke, or some of the cables. But I was wrong. When I was testing wether the cables were connected correctly, I accidently touched the Gigabit Network card and almost burned my finger. It was at least 70°C! I quickly shut down the computer and replaced the old D-Link 528T with a Marvell Yukon. After that everything was working fine again. So if you consider buying a D-Link DGE-528T, DON’T! You should only use them if you need WOL with WOL-cable and won’t leave your computer turned on for longer than 10 hours.
When I got up today morning, my network didn’t seem to work. The DHCP server wasn’t running… Well, I manually set up my ip, trying to ping my server. It seemed to be offline. I turned on the monitor for the server, but it stayed completely black. What now? Well, I restarted the server. But then, my Raid Controller told me my RAID 5 array was broken and asked me if I want to continue booting. How did that happen? Well, I continued booting and everything was working again. RAID 5 is really something nice. Without it, I’d have just lost around 400 GB data. So I downloaded the configuration GUI from Highpoint and started it to get a closer look of what had happened. The Utility told me there was an I/O Error and suggested me to rebuild the array. I clicked okay and everything was fine again. Good thing I was using RAID…
XP is supposed to be stable enough to run without bluescreens. But it wasn’t like that on my computer (AMD Athlon XP 3200+, 1 GB Twinmos Twister Pro). The CPU and RAM are all high-end equiment. The CPU was the fastest of its serie, the RAM has CL 2-2-2-5 and is still one of the best on the market. But still, my computer crashed with a bluescreen. The messages were IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL,
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA or BAD_POOL_CALLER, usually telling me kmixer.sys was the bad file. The error is caused by my onboard sound card. I use it for Voip. What is the problem? PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA sounds like a RAM error. Dual-Channel could cause a lot of problem when mixed with the wrong chips, but mine were from a Dual-Channel-Kit and specially designed for it. I didn’t even overcloak them, even though it was offically allowed by the manufacturer. After days of searching for an answer, I finally solved the problem.