Does anybody have any thoughts or recommendations on hard drives. My Maxtor diamondmax is again making death rattle type noises, it is only 18 months old. The previous resident only managed 18 months or so as well!

My motherboard can use Sata drives, are they more reliable? Looking to replace before it lets me down entirely. The Western Digital Caviar on my other machine seems a lot quieter although it doesn't get the abuse like the Maxtor.

I have always had Western Digital and never had a single problem.

Croc-ref D-LINK where can I get and how much ?
Thanks in advance.

ep

2abbey,
sata wont be more reliable as far as the build is concerned there is nothing new about the construction, I believe that manufacturers will offer sata and ide versions of drives using the same construction, there is one area where I personally think they may be slightly more reliable discussed below. However at the moment Sata doesn't offer much over ide/ata as it is still more expensive and disk performance is not a limiting factor for most PC's , I think this will change soon when the prices drop a bit and I would not be surprised to see them dominant in about 18 months.

I have also used WD drives and until recently I hadn't had one fail, the drive I have in my main PC which is a SFF Shuttle is starting to get noisy, I will replace it soon before it fails, Although it has worked very hard and is normally switched on for 24 hours a day I think the fact that it is running in a hotter environment than is ideal may have hastened its demise. This is one minor area where sata drives could be worth having, as they have very slim connection cables which mean that the PC insides can be kept cooler with better airflow. I have a feeling that high performance PCs which produce a lot of heat my be one of the reasons why disk drive failures do not seem to be uncommon, I don't have any hard facts to prove this but I have noticed that many PC's run much hotter than they did a couple of years ago.

My advice on which drives to buy? make sure you keep good backups of important data and then buy well known brand named drives and keep one as a spare, they are so cheap now that its not a big deal to replace a drive. WD are very good but most of the known brands you can find somewhere like http://www.ebuyer.co.uk are fine for most users.

I am a long term fan of IBM for disk drives as they have been very active in pushing DD technology forward but I have had several of their recent drives fail and a quick google search will show that I am not the only one. So for now I would not use IBM.

Can anybody direct me to a place where I can update my Java to the latest version? I am not sure if I have Sun or a different brand - I have been told to upgrade as some streaming services are not working.

Thanks.

if you look at the help pages, go to the FAQ and scroll down there is a link there somewhere...

http://java.sun.com/webapps/getjava/BrowserRedirect?locale=en&host=www.java.com:80

try there...

Thanks Tullett. Did I speak to you the other day when I had a hangover?

I have no idea, I was probably sleeping so quite likely :)

"SecurityFocus: War of words rages over Internet taps

...

Federal law already compels ISPs to cooperate with law enforcement in court-approved surveillance of customers. But as police rely more on Internet snooping -- with tools like the FBI's "Carnivore" DCS-1000 packet sniffer -- they've begun to crave the speed and ease-of-use of the wiretapping infrastructure that CALEA grafted onto the modern telephone network, described in a filing by the New York state Attorney General's office this way: "Within minutes of receipt of the court order, warrants for the interception of wireless devices can be implemented by the communications carriers. With just a few computer key strokes, the connection is made directly between law enforcement's computerized listening stations and the telephone service provider's computerized switches."

The Justice Department plan would make Internet taps as easy, though at great expense to Internet service providers and their customers.

..."

http://www.hacktivismo.com/news/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2484

Sound Card problem
I've recently re-installed Win2k on my system but I can't seem to set up
the sound card properly.

The first thing I noticed was that there was no Volume control icon in the
task bar tray.
But when I go to Control Panel-> Sounds and Multimedia the volume Control
slider and the "Show Volume Control on the Taskbar" checkbox are greyed
out.

However, I can run the Volume Control as an application and it appears to
work - I can play WAV files through the Windows Media Player and I can
listen to Audio CDs through the sound card.

But Real Player will not play anything at all, sometimes it just appears
to play with no sound coming out, other times it says something like
"another program is using the audio device".

I have a Sound Blaster 5.1 Live PCI card. And all was working fine before
I re-installed win2k. I have un-installed then re-installed the drivers
from the CD several times and also tried letting Windows Plug and Play do
it.

Although what I'm trying to do is get Real Player to work, I can't help
thinking that the problem is with the sound card drivers as I have never
seen the situation before where it was not possible to put the volume
control on the task bar tray.

Any ideas guys?

Quick one:
My friend wants me to format his computer.He uses Win 98.I can format my XP with no probs.
Do i follow the same steps to format in 98?
Iain

Ian
You mad need a floppy boot disk with Format & Fdisk on it
If you find you need a copy let me know.
D.

Iain, use a bootdisk from this site http://www.bootdisk.com lots of different boot disks available and a very usefull site at times.

kajman, if you goto start/settings/control panel/system/hardware/device manager are there any items listed with red crosses or yellow question marks?

It sounds as theough w2k isnt happy with the device setup.

Spaceman
Thats a great site!

Kajman
Have you tried http://us.creative.com/support/downloads/download2.asp?centric=50&dlcentric=1925&ProductName=Sound+Blaster+Live!+5.1&OS=9&OSName=Windows+2000
D.

Many thanks for prompt replies.As usual:-)Where would I be without you.
Not just the best site for stock related stuff!
Iain

Spaceman
No, that looks OK:



Croc, I got a download from there, but when I tried to run it I got this message:



I had something similar from another Creative download. They seem to distribute patches to existing drivers rather than complete drivers. But if the current system is broken then that's not much help.

Kajman, i think your PC may be using another sound device? possibly the Unimodem half duplex thing mentioned in the above. DO you have 2 cqards that could be providing sound?

edit added, have you run a windows update since upgrading to w2k?