Posts about hardware, software, or the tech industry itself

Pictures of the new Baby…

I’ve had my MacBook Pro for a week now, thought it would be a good time to share some pictures.  Here she is:

 

This picture was taken the very first time I powered the machine on, after it had completed its initial setup.  The machine came pre-installed with OSX 10.4.10: the last version of OSX before Leopard.  I got a "free" upgrade to Leopard (just had to pay shipping and handling), and it arrived here yesterday.  Here’s how the Mac looks now with Leopard installed…

(more…)

Continue ReadingPictures of the new Baby…

Gettin’ jiggy with VMWare on the Mac

I mentioned earlier that I had installed VMWare Fusion on my MacBook.  One of my objectives with this was to be able to run Windows Live Writer on my Macintosh for editing this blog.

You might rightly point out that there are plenty of blog editors for the Macintosh, some of them reasonably good.  However…I’ve tried several of them, and they don’t work quite as well for my purposes as Live Writer does.  So…how did things go?

(more…)

Continue ReadingGettin’ jiggy with VMWare on the Mac

Asus M2R32 motherboard: defective RAID/AHCI?

I mentioned in a previous post here that I picked up some additional hard drives.  The 750 GB drive is running happily in an external eSATA-connected enclosure and is providing backup for my machine.  The other two drives are sitting on a shelf, and will remain there indefinitely.  There is a story behind their banishment from my computer.  It isn’t that there is anything particularly wrong with the drives themselves: I’ve finally concluded that my Asus motherboard has crappy RAID/AHCI support.

I have spent the last couple of days repeatedly building and tearing down my machine.  First I built a RAID 1 array.  Bear in mind that the drives I’m using are good quality Seagate 7200.10 drives: they have full SATA2 support, including Native Command Queuing (NCQ).  The drives they displaced were high-end WD Raptor 1500ADFD drives: arguably, the Raptors are better drives, but I had suspicions that WD drives might be behind my problems putting my system into standby mode in Vista.  I was wrong.

(more…)

Continue ReadingAsus M2R32 motherboard: defective RAID/AHCI?

End of content

No more pages to load