The ScooterBlog

Those of you who know me well also know that I am a very lost person without having the Internet. Some would view this as an addiction, and I’m not here to disagree, but it is what it is, so to have the fun I’ve had with my first two weeks here and computers was definitely more then most people should have to endure in a lifetime!

Computer Problem #1

My P4 machine is so old, that the choice of socket (Socket 423) made it one revision. Even scarier, I found a board that took this chipset and adds to the mix VERY craptastic SDRAM memory! The thing is built with such junk inside that it should topple over or burn itself up any day, yet, it was still reliable and had plenty of hard drives inside.

Until the 100 gig boot drive decided to give in. Just a few months out of warranty too!! I got most everything off of it, but it was toast, and it needed a new case, which it got. That computer is just now getting back on its feet.

Computer Problem #2

My main computer’s hard drive decided to stop detecting. Now this is a problem, cause this 160 gig drive had things I really did need. Come to find out after about a day and a half of messing with it that it was a busted power splitter causing it and the DVD Burner on the same wire to short and not get enough juice. Nonetheless, it gave me the excuse to replace the boot drives (a 40 gig and 30 gig) with something decent (60 gig and 80 gig) and re-do the spanned disk setup I had … NEVER DO SPANNED DISKS! Too much trouble. 

It also is finally getting back on its feet today, but I think I will need to replace the Radeon 8500 card in it, which is starting to show weird signs of sketchiness, and it may be worth getting a Athlon XP 3000 Barton chip in it and some more memory. The network card seems sketchy, definitely doesn’t do a true 100 megabit, so I could stand to get a new one of those too. But, it does function now, thank god.

So, that’s two computers down and now back up. Did I mention I’m gonna upgrade Danielle’s machine with new hard drives and her parents’ PC with remnants of ANOTHER dead PC?

The WOW – Time Warner Debacle

I was sharing a 3 megabit line downstream with 2 others in Cincinnati. I could leech sometimes, but certain things never could be done with maintaining shared bandwidth like torrents. Danielle only had 768kbit downstream, so I knew I was gonna upgrade it when I moved up here.

Twice, including the weekend before I moved up there, I tried to get TIme Warner to come in and switch. Both times, they had rewiring issues, one time the guy said they would make an appointment (and didn’t), the other time I warned TW that rewiring needed to be done, but they did not listen. Both times, they got kicked out of my place, no business. I called WOW and instantly went to 6 megabit downstream, needless to say, this worked just fine for me!

(Note that the wiring was always a bit weird, but hey, it worked, so I never thought much about it)

So last Saturday, I wake up to find that I have no cable or internet. I call WOW, and the quickest they can get someone out is Monday, and I’m the only person who has called, it’s not an outage. Didn’t like it, but I was headed to Cincinnati anyways, so it was alright.

Sunday morning, I wake up to cable TV, but no Internet, and my Scientific Atlanta cable modem has five lights blinking in unison, basically screaming “WTF?!”. Come to find out later in the day as I was hunting for the Regional Final NCAA games, that it wasn’t WOW anymore, it was Time Warner! I talked to Patrick Mize, my neighbor, anyone I could to try and make sense of the issue, and it didn’t make sense … until later.

WOW came out the next day and switched the line back to WOW. They said Time Warner had been screwing with the lines. Time Warner called me later that day about a wiring appointment, unwarranted too. I railed on them pretty hard, and didn’t mind a bit, their Columbus team is now 0-for-3 in my book.

So Wednesday comes around, and the neighbor directly above me, Kaylee, knocks on our door. Come to find out, the cable wire is run straight down through three condo units (which can’t be legal or good), so when she was calling Time Warner to get service (never mind that she had free basic WOW cable!), they cut off three people, not one. She said that TW was supposed to come out on Friday and wire her up, and that we’d all see how it went.

Friday came and gone and I still had cable, so thus ended the saga for now. The speeds have been insane (700 kilobytes a second from newsgroups), and the service has been good, so WOW has me as a permanent customer for the time being.