I mentioned some time ago a frustrating issue with the hardware on my desktop that I had finally solved. I got the new system Which was a 64-bit AMD Athlon on an Asus k8N4-E board and a pci-express nvidia based card (6200 TurboCache), 1 GB of memory… Things worked very nice for a while, rock solid stable and no issues. But the one day, I noticed…. “where did my tvcard go”. There were 2 pci slots, one I had used for a tvcard, the other for an addon sound card.
Tag: PCI
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Basic Hardware troubleshooting
Sometimes machines stop working, or you install a new piece of hardware and just can’t boot again. That’s when you have to get back to some basics to troubleshoot what the problem is. Yesterday I saw a machine that wasn’t booting. It would display the splash screen and then power down. They had a new video card on a previous diagnosis using the indicator lights on the back (Dell). The add on card seemed to work, but the system was just not booting. Someone had suggested to them that it was a power problem.
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Sams club credit security breech?
When I saw a story on incidents.org with the title PCI Compliance, I wondered what SANS was doing covering a hardware standard…. oops. PCI in this case means Payment Card Industry. It turns out that Sams Club has had a security breech that has exposed customers credit card information. The data seems to have been pinched from those buying gas between Sept. 21st and Oct. 2nd.
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Tools of the trade…. USB network adapter
For a long time I really disliked seeing USB network adapters. The main reason is the performance. USB 1 can only do ~ 12Mbps which compared to a 10/100 ethernet controller “significantly limits your ability to do more than 10…” Even USB 2 supports 480 Mbps which should give you the ability to get full throughput of up to 200mbps with full duplexing. However, I still cringed at USB network adapters….