Rough night for electronics

[koØm]

THEME: Computer repair

PLOT: Gremlins Attack PC's at night.

I awoke yesterday morning to find that the clock on the Coffee Maker was flashing 12:00 am, that indicated that power had been lost sometime during the night; I didn't think anything about it, it happens occasionally.

Later in the day, I went to a PC (Dual boot-XP and Vista) that I had left on (mistakenly) over night and, it was frozen on the Windows Splash screen. When I rebooted it, I received the message that a file (WINDOWS\System32\config\system) was missing or corrupted. After kicking the Alligators in the ass, I proceed with the normal Swamp-draining job of re-establishing both OS's.

Later that day, I decided to watch some TV that was stored on my PC-PVR (Pentium 4 @ 3.0Ghz with Beyond-TV) and, it was dead, wouldn't even power up. This machine runs 24-7 to record TV programs at it's convenience and, it's set to restart after a loss of power. The sags and surges of the restart was too much for the ATX power supply and it bit the dust. I pulled a power supply from the "Spares Box" and was soon back on the air - TV recording wise.

Climax and Resolution: "I came. I saw and, I conquered!"

Moral: Get back up power units for the computers that you love.

.

[N8OBM]

THEME: Computer repair

PLOT: Gremlins Attack PC's at night.

I awoke yesterday morning to find that the clock on the Coffee Maker was flashing 12:00 am, that indicated that power had been lost sometime during the night; I didn't think anything about it, it happens occasionally.

Later in the day, I went to a PC (Dual boot-XP and Vista) that I had left on (mistakenly) over night and, it was frozen on the Windows Splash screen. When I rebooted it, I received the message that a file (WINDOWS\System32\config\system) was missing or corrupted. After kicking the Alligators in the ass, I proceed with the normal Swamp-draining job of re-establishing both OS's.

Later that day, I decided to watch some TV that was stored on my PC-PVR (Pentium 4 @ 3.0Ghz with Beyond-TV) and, it was dead, wouldn't even power up. This machine runs 24-7 to record TV programs at it's convenience and, it's set to restart after a loss of power. The sags and surges of the restart was too much for the ATX power supply and it bit the dust. I pulled a power supply from the "Spares Box" and was soon back on the air - TV recording wise.

Climax and Resolution: "I came. I saw and, I conquered!"

Moral: Get back up power units for the computers that you love.

.

There is an old saying " A switching power supply is one that is a few milliseconds away from disaster.". Unstable power is all the excuse a switching supply needs for said disaster. It is true. I have seen it personally. If you value your data, put your machine on a UPS. and set it up to auto shutdown the computer when is senses a power outage. It's about $100 for a cheap UPS and it saves you from SO many problems.

An ounce of prevention etc. etc. etc.

Archie N8OBM

[KG4CGC]

Or just get back up (UPS) for the modem and router and run all laptops. You can plug them in to your HDTVs now via HDMI.

Hard to let go of the towers though. Keep one around for various heavy duty applications.

As for OS, running Win8 on the XYLs laptop. That stuff's amazing. Plugged the printer in and before I could go get the software, it had already found and installed the software and was ready to go without any blood letting.

[koØm]

Hard to let go of the towers though. Keep one around for various heavy duty applications.



Foolishly, I still have 4 towers on my home network, one is dedicated to the radio room and Legacy software, another is my TV server/DVR, there is another in my bedroom and, still another in my kids room. I put a dent in my utility bill by putting them on power strips and only powering them up a couple of times a week to keep my Enterprise Antivirus and Windose updated. I can't get rid of them because I have more money in them than they are worth on the market plus, they are infected with my person information and crap that I need to access on occasions.

My Mac Book Pro runs on Snow Leopard and has a version of 64 bit Vista / Windows 7 running on a virtual machine; this Laptop is just a status symbol. There are two other Intel Dual-core Laptops in the house are running Vista Ultimate.

My cellphone has more processing power that the 3.0 Ghz Hyper threading towers.

ETA: I forgot to mention the Cisco Catalyst switches and router lashed up to tie it all together.

.

[KG4CGC]

That sir is beyond my pay grade. There are others here that I often ask for help who eat, sleep and breathe CPU cycles without even trying.

[n2ize]

Everything here is professional grade these days with top of the line, high capacity power systems. I can stay up for several hours in the event of an outage.

[kb2vxa]

And the YL in your life loves you for it.

[KG4CGC]

And the YL in your life loves you for it.

And guess where the batteries go.

[kb2vxa]

In the UPS.

[w6tmi]

I used to worry about staying up during a power outage... I have to do that crap at work.
Now I just make sure I CAN if needed (food storage and other necessities). My kindle has a backlight, and last for a couple days, so an evening of power outage is actually an excuse for a quite night.

[KG4CGC]

I used to worry about staying up during a power outage... I have to do that crap at work.
Now I just make sure I CAN if needed (food storage and other necessities). My kindle has a backlight, and last for a couple days, so an evening of power outage is actually an excuse for a quite night.

Before cellphones had flashlights, I used my cellphone display to find my flashlight.

[N8YX]

Foolishly, I still have 4 towers on my home network, one is dedicated to the radio room and Legacy software, another is my TV server/DVR, there is another in my bedroom and, still another in my kids room. I put a dent in my utility bill by putting them on power strips and only powering them up a couple of times a week to keep my Enterprise Antivirus and Windose updated. I can't get rid of them because I have more money in them than they are worth on the market plus, they are infected with my person information and crap that I need to access on occasions.

Get a dual-socket i7 or AMD 6xxx server motherboard which will take at least 2x as much RAM as the total you have in your physical boxes. Build it into a suitable case; install an SSD RAID array with at least twice the capacity of the total disk storage you have in your physical systems. When done, obtain VMWare's ESXi hypervisor and install it on the host system. Then, use their migration tools to virtualize each physical server. Power each VM up to test it then take a snapshot with the ESXi Console.

Serial, network and other peripheral interface hardware can also be virtualized. You'll then use RDP or a direct ESXi Console session into each VM for purposes of interaction.

The solution I'm thinking about building up will also have redundant 500w PSUs with auto-switchover functionality and will be buffered from line glitches by a 1+KVA UPS. I found details of the hardware in a ZDNet article and think I can get a complete system together for around $4K, give or take.