Suprisingly most of my floppies from 1990+ survived. Ever since 2000 I'd been slowly transferring them to my external HD's. I didn't have that many floppies...mabye 50+ but I was just lazy. 😀 Sadly while I was in Tech School my Parent's moved and alot of good ones were lost including my 5.25" Lost Treasures of Infocom collection. 🙁

It's amazing how good the quality is for ummm what's the word, the floppies that had programs on 'em already as compared to the ones you buy in the store. Since I wiped all of my floppies, every time I grab a blank floppy out of my "floppy box" almost every time the store bought floppies turn out to be bad whereas the ones that came with programs usually are the good ones. Just goes to show how bad quality can get once a produce goes out of use.....

Trusting HD's for a backup solution had always kind of bothered me but I have duplicate HD's for every one of my HD's.....just have to make sure I listen for strange noises and perform regular maintenance. Too bad you can't lookup SMART info over USB (heh...like that would help). Going to see if Spinrite v6 can see SMART data from DOS since I heard that it can see HD's over USB/Firewire.

Anyways, for the past 4 years using external HD's as backup I've only had 1-2 Western Digitals fail (never both HD's with the same data). The HD failure was my fault due to carrying these things all around the world and the transfer and heat over in Iraq was what probably killed 'em.

SMART info over USB? Yes, that would be nice but I fear it's simply something the IDE/USB bridge chip doesn't support. When it comes to backups, I think CD-Rs or DVD-Rs are the best choice. You can't overwrite them and they seem to be pretty durable. Also, you an store them in a safe place.

Synchronized hard disks are already pretty safe, but what if they get both fried due to large currents or something like that if they are in the same server? And if you always have full access to the data, deleting it by accident is perhaps more likely than a hardware failure.

I'm currently relying on a single external hard disk which is somewhat risky so I'm considering buying an external dvd writer for my notebook really soon.

DosFreak wrote:

Suprisingly most of my floppies from 1990+ survived. Ever since 2000 I'd been slowly transferring them to my external HD's. I didn't have that many floppies...mabye 50+ but I was just lazy. 😀 Sadly while I was in Tech School my Parent's moved and alot of good ones were lost including my 5.25" Lost Treasures of Infocom collection. 🙁

So true - if video killed the radio star, moving is the worst when it comes to destroy treasures from the past.

Between my parents divorce, house sale, me moving out, and my own divorce, I have lots punch cards, punched paper tapes, audio cassettes with my very own first programs, and my entire collection of Superman, Spiderman, Batman & Robin, etc, etc. Sniff 🙁 Sniff.

If I was President, every citizen should have free access to a secure storage facility of 6 m^2 from the day they were born!!!!

Aaaaaaaaaannnnnnnyyyyyyyyways, getting back to the original topic:

I finally got around to opening my 21" monitor. Turns out they encased everything in a sturdy aluminum (or steel?) RF/protective shield, which is cool because I always get a little paranoid when it comes to making adjustments to operating electronic devices which generate charges of tens of thousands of volts. Fortunately, they decided to put some holes in the shield for me to stick my pot trimmer through to adjust the potentiometers on the flyback transformer. The available controls were pretty standard, and were labeled on the shield:
- "screen". Internal brightness, which as with most old monitors needed to be increased so that I would no longer need to set the user brightness setting to maximum
- "focus 1" and "focus 2". I don't remember which was which (not important), but one was horizontal focus and the other vertical focus. I don't think I made too much of an improvement - between the age of the CRT and the type of aperture grille (I'm not up on those enough to be able to tell you which kind it is) there was only so much I could do. I guess it'll just give me a little free anti-aliasing at high resolutions 😉

I think I'll feel a little less blasphemous playing newer games on this old monitor now 😀

Also, I learned about this stuff by researching the repairing and maintenance of CRTs after having a dead monitor or three. I've since improved the viewing quality of nearly a half-dozen old and older computer monitors using this trick (adjusting the flyback transformer controls). The trick should also work for any other CRT-based display devices, such as TVs, but their user-adjustable brightness settings usually go much higher and their definition is low enough that focusing them wouldn't result in much (if any) of a noticeable improvement in quality.

I'm probably going to obsess about the focus on this thing. If I ever get my hands on a magnifying glass, I'll probably use that to see the bleeding of individual pixels better as I adjust the pots.

Oh, I also ordered one of these: http://www.zippy.com/K_product_detail.asp?lv_ … &pk_code=WK-720

Hopefully it will arrive tomorrow, but the crackheads at UPS never scanned the package after it left Georgia, so I have no idea where the hell it is. I find it hard to believe that it could be on the same exact truck for 5 days, as I find it highly unlikely that they'd be sending a truck straight from Doraville, Georgia (where the f*ck is that?) all the way to Fife, Washington (no, I don't live there - my local UPS sorting facility does). They'll probably try to deliver it when nobody's home, as usual; what the f*ck good is choosing "residential" delivery instead of "business" delivery if they still deliver it mid-morning when my roommates and I are all at work/school? I think residential delivery just means that they send some horny delivery guy out to sleep with your wife while you're out making money at work or something...

So, yeah, I think it's a pretty cool looking keyboard. Definitely better than this boring, white $5 CompUSA PS/2 keyboard I'm using now.

Eew. I can't stand not having a full-sized keyboard. I HATE typing on my laptop for that precise reason. Despite the fact that it's fairly logical to have a vertical line of home/end/pgup/pgdn, I still muchly prefer the standard 3x2 block.

Yeah that was the biggest drawback I could see to that keyboard. I've noticed that the vast majority of sexy keyboards seem to use those "slim"/"compact" designs though. In the end, I decided that it has all the keys, so I should be able to get used to it.

DosFreak wrote:

Okay, cleaned up my plugin and reverified the reg keys, then I posted at Wilders. Will probably get some useless posts but what the heck. I did try some newer snapapi, snapman files which seems to get me the same behavior that the other forum posters were having. Guess we'll have to wait till Acronis releases a later ver.

Things are moving along quite nicely here:

http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=11844