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the undead acer

I haven't been able to make Belladonna reproduce its hard drive errors it was experiencing so readily the other week. I did run badblocks on it via `e2fsck -c -c' (two -c's for safe read-write, instead of just read). It was kind of annoying, because, though I was running it from a LiveCD, it kept complaining that the drive I was trying to run it on, /dev/sda5, was already mounted. I had not mounted it, and mount knew nothing about it, of course. I think it has something to do with the logical volume manager. I ended up running something like

e2fsck -c -c /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00

Which got the job done. It claimed my file system had been modified at the end but didn't report having found any badblocks. Running

smartctl --test=long /dev/sda

also claimed that no errors were found. Since I activatd smartd, I have 141 UDMA CRC errors:

199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x000a   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       141

But that's without experiencing any of the failure I was seeing before. Sigh.

So, I'm making use of Belladonna at home, but I'm not trusting it with any important data yet. It has to regain my confidence (which I'm not sure if I should eer give it :) It just gets to be of use here. I think I might like to set it up as a sort of desktop, but that would require desk space and I'll have to check with Liv about its availability. It would be much more convenient than my CRT monitor :) When I get my other ``new'' USB disk (that I'm purchasing off my brother), I could set up a software RAID between it and my other one (named after my hometown).

computer sales

I am pleased to see a $450 PC at Future Shop that has all the specs (and more) that I'd recommend to any PC seeking friend. It is 64-bit, dual core, AMD-rated at 4400+. For memory and storage, it has 2GB DDR2 memory, a 320GB HDD at 7200RPM, and a 16x dual-layer DVD burner. Sadly, the video card is an awful integrated ATI Radeon X1200 and the OS is Windows Vista Home.

Recently someone said that ultraportable and inexpensive laptops like the Asus Eee PC would provoke a ``race to the bottom'', where power-driven innovation would slow down. I'm not opposed?