Well let me start with the options of retail property in buffalo

If its not dilapidated, its still in a bad neighborhood. If its not too small (more than 700 sq ft,) its much too big (more than 1600 sq ft). If it looks perfect, the landlord is unavailable by phone, email and voicemail.

Then the lease... can be designed to screw you into oblivion. The building might also have zero traffic, both foot and street.

if you have something acceptable, the rent is simply very high because of the rare occurence that the building is not water damaged, the landlord is nice and is the right size with the right amount of traffic.

but really, what does that matter when you're just handing all the cash to your landlord?

1200/month is going to be impossible to justify. But I'm signing it, and yknow why? because there's not much opportunity out there.

It's like the property caste system in buffalo. But I must try even if it kills me, I don't want to sit around waiting for something magical to appear out of the mist.

Blackberry pit falls post 3

The call log doesn't work. Dont buy this phone its a lemon.

The Tech in a Sec retail location

this is my biggest undertaking since college. its probably not as big as that, but its close. Where do I begin? I got the store, the website, landlord and employees already. I just havent opened yet!

I'm waiting until aug 10 for my landlord, and I need to get some documentation to get everything rolling nicely along.

1. new york state Tax ID
2. Bank account in the businesse's name
3. letter of credit for international purchases
4. merchant account to accept credit transactions
5. POS system software and fully operational transaction database (wow)
6. Domain controller for the network
7. Liability insurance

I couldnt start on this tonight since I'm nocturnal and nothing's open... so I did what I could do, and got the Domain controller to work. Holy crap was that a nightmare with DNS... But its distributing addresses and sharing printers/files like a pro under windows 2003 server standard.

Any computer was going to work, so I used my very slowest one... a pentium II @ 350mhz from Q1 of 1998. It had a bad CD-ROM drive, floppy, hard drive and even the power button failed because it was caked with industrial sludge.

But I quickly replaced all those things with throw-away parts, and got it working on a refurb 40GB hdd using a cheap PCI RAID controller with its updated (2004) BIOS. I spliced the power button wires over to the unused reset button. This became the new power button.

Then I added a USB 2.0 controller from which the very large archive of ISO images, applets and other tools will be hosted on external hard drives totalling 2 TB. The controller also has two laser printers on a self-powered hub.

It distributes IP addresses, takes large print jobs, and authenticates in no time, all across the gigabit switch.

this useless piece of junk has been transformed into a worthy backbone for my business, but of course not without its many frustrated hours into the making.

Solid State drive in a pentium pro system

I wanted to make the coolest pentium 1 based system anywhere, and so I thought, why not make it solid state?

So I got an IDE interface to Compact Flash card adapter, as well as an 8GB sandisk Ultra III (30mb/sec read) compact flash card.

This is what it had:

Broken hard drive 3.4GB
3 PCI slots, 4 ISA slots
1 DIMM slot, 4 SIMM slots
socket 7 CPU, cyrix instead @ 250Mhz (upgrade from pentium 1)
CD-RW drive
broken floppy
Token Ring network adapter


I added this:
New hard drive 4.1GB standard hdd
256mb of PC-133, but only reads 128mb @66mhz
ATI All in wonder 128 16mb PCI video
Sound Blaster Live! Basic sound
Netgear 10/100 ethernet card PCI
USB 2.0 PCI

then I installed windows 2000 (2+hrs). I then took the basic 4.1GB drive, adapted it to a usb external enclosure hooked up to a new computer. I ghosted it over to the CF card.

I put the CF card back into the pentium pro and it started booting windows 2000. Everything was going great, I even played Zdoom for windows at 640x480, 25 FPS and with working sound. I was golden, and in solid state, no less. The boot and shut down times were phenomenal! The USB 2.0 card could never install devices correctly, however. I removed it.

I hit reset, and it froze while booting into windows 2000. I booted into safe mode and determined that the registry wasnt being handeled correctly on the CF card. the yellow exclamation points dotted device manager, and the reason was a "corrupt registry."

oh well. I just want to play doom again.

So reset, try again, reset, tried again, reset... success.

Now what?

well, this thing doesnt have enough ram to be a decent server of any kind... so I guess I'll try adding more ram to the available SIMM slots that were unused. I guess SIMM and DIMM simultaneously is bad news. The memory test tallied the total, but i got the black screen of nothing during POST.

I removed the simm ram and tried it again and it was running good in safe mode.

about a day later I returned to find that the system stopped booting entirely, even from the old hard drive.

OLD TECHNOLOGY is so unreliable! the HDD controller just failed for no reason! well, its actually the power supply's fault. it always is on old systems! and just a tip, when the Powersupply goes, the hdd controller is the first thing that follows.

But it sure was fun to have a solid state windows 2000 installation on an ancient 1996 AT-board PC! I hope to have a better ATX setup next time.

VMware installation pitfall

Don't install VMware products on a windows partition that doesn't use Drive C:\ as its root, and is on a mult-boot system. VMware will keep windows XP from booting because the virtual devices dont get installed correctly on non-C drive system roots.

Nvidia 780i overheating issues

overheating problems with your nVidia 780i SLI motherboard? EVGA or some other name is on it, no doubt, but that tends to make little/no difference. But unbeknownst to most is the tolerances are very high for the chips. MCP (south bridge) and NPP (north bridge) are like 86 C° to 120 C° ! The Nvida 9800 GTX/GTX+ GPU is like 120 C° and the CPU shouldnt get over 72 C° unless you're using a modded 486 HSF, or fanless metal arrangement. Those things can be huge.

I've been running strong since September of 2008 (5 months ago), and as much as unreal tournament's physx mods cook my GPU's they've never failed and I've never had an overheat failure yet.

Set the Nvidia control panel to alert you once components reach certain temps. that way i know when to unplug myself from the eye candy or pi calculations for a while.

Cheap gear from ativa... apparently

Everyone looking for cheap technology should go to their local Office Depot, stat. and cash in on the liquidation of their Ativa brand gear. I got a 4GB flash drive for $3.92, and a 52-in-1 card reader for $12.00 marked down from $40. 100pk of DVD's for 2.95!! so I picked up 12 of those.

Norton Ghost and dual booting

Who said norton ghost doesn't support dual boot systems??
just image the partitions separately, and rebuild the partition tables to match the original state. Then you can perform individual restores. However, its true that if you attempt to image the entire multi-boot drive(s), it will do so unsucessfully. This is true for every drive imaging program available, even acronis true image.

blackberry storm pitfalls, blog 2

If you take a picture using the blackberry camera you MUST set the options to save to the memory card. If you allow it to stay set on the device memory (Default) you can never get the pictures off.

Methods attempted to remove pics from device memory

1. browse storm using windows explorer - pictures are encrypted (invisible files)
2. Send using bluetooth - One picture succeeds after a LOT of work and correct timing.
3. Send Folder using bluetooth - You cant send/move folders
4. Migrate pictures to memory card - option not available
5. Use blackberry's media manager on desktop software - Doesn't exist for the storm

So change your default save location to the memory card. It pretty much doesn't make sense taking pictures otherwise.

blackberry storm 9530 and Vista and Bluetooth

Well if you click on the picture, you can see how the blackberry storm 9530 connects to windows Vista (64 & 32 bit versions).

That is, it doesn't...

So you thought you could use PC headphones with a microphone and a good 'ol bluetooth connection to make phone calls easy? May be because you don't like sticking a piece of plastic in your face for 2 hours. May be you're getting injuries about the spine and shoulder waiting for Dell customer support to send you to an American? Well if you plan to use a PC to make/take calls with your cell phone provider, but you have a bluetoothed blackberry storm in the middle.... you'll be thoroughly disappointed.

Blackberry's got the modem connection, but has two failed installs for its other capabilities... eg. voice. But it LOOKS pretty... ? If you want to step forward into the world of technology that "Works" as opposed to technology that's "Advanced," (eg. blackberry storm) then go BACK in time to a chapter of cell phone history (2006-2007) that blackberry's executives decided to ignore. An LG vx6100 from spring 2006 for example:

Has no issues doing anything you need to do with a cell. Bluetooth and all. Did I mention it's faster???

Can Someone throw me a clue here?

bad Sound or Microphone in vista

Windows Vista sound is too quiet or too low
How do I fix it?

So, you've turned up all the volume knobs to 100% and it still doesn't cut it??

Here's two less than obvious solutions:

1. Go to start > control panel > sound > (playback tab should already be selected) > speakers > properties > levels > Balance > Make sure all channels are set to 100% and the sliders are all to the right

2. OR if you have "Noise Cancelling" head phones, MANY of those require batteries as well as being powered by the pc. so check for a battery compartment on your headphones if they are too quiet. That might help levels on your attached microphone as well.

More obvious answers

1. click speaker icon in the lower right hand corner of the start bar and increase all levels to 100%
2. go to windows media player and increase sound to 100%

Microphone on my head phones or earpiece doesn't work in Vista

Go to start > control panel > sound > recording tab > select Microphone and hit "Set Default" button. Do this Even if there isn't a volume indicator on the far right, or if the volume indicator is showing activity on other lines. Hit "Properties" button for microphone and click the speaker icon -make sure it is unmuted! Than you can do microphone boost to increase the sound.

Blog 0

I'm going to try making this blog a place that people can read things they can relate to. People also have to gain something from it, because gain will be the goal and focus of this blog. Afterall, what's the point of reading without being better off than you were before?

Being a former IT manager and owner of a PC repair business (and an all-round swell guy) I'm going to put not only my thoughts and opinions up here, but answers to common technical problems. Oh yeah, I'm definitely going to be googled for answers. Experience is the rarest knowledge, and is so quickly shared on the web. I write to the public without bias or alterior motives... just plain old helping people out and giving my two cents.