Yes, Tech stories... This is where i will be talking about all of the wild things i have done with PCs. These might help you with your personal troubleshooting, entertain you, or make your head explode.
DP Switch issues
I am a fan of maximum pc and my pc isent that maximum. I had gained interest beacuse my cpu was slow and i like to screw around with computers. At first i read a artical in a CPU mag when my computer was hooked up into my livingroom upstairs. My dad bought the mag wile on the ferrie mostlikley. I screwed around and tried to follow the instructions, and i did, somewhat. I would increase my fsb up and up untill my motherboard would give me an overclocking error, which happend alot wile using the automatic overclocking. I increased it to around 240mhz, i thought i would boot up into windows instead of just rebooting after hiting the bios. I got an error about the registry when i hit my windows login. After loging in i hit a few more, so before i can shutdown my pc it freezes. My computer never freezes, but beacuse i was screwing around with it, i should of expected it. Maximum pc allways said "backup your stuff", id say screw that. I allways play around and i never hit any issues. Well this time i did, after rebooting i got an error wile loading windows. I did some research on a computer nearby. It seemed i had corrupted my registry, or atleast a part of it. I assumed that it was the overclocking so i reduced it back to default. Then i used my handy NTFS4DOS floppy to do a chkdsk. It fixed some files but not my registry. I noticed i had a backup of my registry. God knows how old it was beacuse i never knew i actualy had. After messing around with the files, trying to move them, creating batch files, etc. I backed up the current ones and put the even older ones to there new destination. I thought, hey it needs that file, i have a backup. It may be older and smaller but its worth a try. I gave her a reboot and tada, she started. I had a alot of errors but if i could use windows that was a huge plus. I used it for mabye a week and i got fed up! when majority of my programs needed to be reinstalled, i get errors every 5mins it gets rather annoying. I backed my stuff onto my dads pc and reinstalled the OS. After that i figured, before screwing with pc allways backup stuff. People allways say backup your stuff, i had never had any issues, ever. If you have midrage+ namebrand equipment i trust it to work. Names like: Asus, Kingston, Western Digital, VIA.
To this day iv still reinstalled XP after i screw somthing up. I used Norton Ghost 12 to backup rather recently and i think beacuse i dident backup the entire drive it dident give me an image. I couldnot use the backup using my Hirens Boot Disk. Now at this point i was abit confused because i knew somthing on my PC wasent working right. I did extensive scans to findout what had the error. In the process i formated my harddrive withouteven knowing it. Both my backup Partition i had created and my Primary partition. Before i had allways backed up my stuff via my dads pc or creating a backup partition. I lost everything, from my saved games in varios games to pictures from me and friends from grade 8 to present. It was a huge loss and i tried recovery software, dident work do to the extream harddrive test.
Graphics Processor Unit Overclocking is rather simple and generaly adjusted with software. Commonly used Ati Tool, Riva Tuner, Power Strip, and Ntune. All of my video cards have been ATI, but to overclock them is rather the same untill you go to into bios editing. The most important thing i would say is to make sure if you have a stock cooler that your videocard doesnt overheat or melt. If you have a modern videocard Ati Tool or Riva tuner would probably be your best bet. I find Ati Tool the easy, lightweight, and effective. With the Ati Saphire X1650 Pro i had an issue with the ram clock. If you have some issues try enabling driver level overclocking. When you overclock your GPU your proformance gain isent as high has you would think. If you are trying to squeese some extra power out of your card then obiously this is the way to do it. Simply in incriments increase the freq of your graphics ram up in small 5mhz incriments untill your 30mhz higher. then add in 5mhz incirments till you get 20mhz aditional on your gpu. Iv found since your videocard ram runs at a lower freq than the gpu, you gain more proformance by increasing the ram to a higher freq. Ati tool also has a built in 3D addon so you can see the proformance difference.
SCSIs are commonly known as superfast harddrives used for professional servers due to their speed and the ablility to configure in many different ways. Not all servers want small storage and fast speed. Which is the reason why you can setup scsi harddrives in more reasons then just speed and storage. Mabye you want to have a failsafe backup incase of harddrive damage like overheat, general decay, virus, and etc. At some point i accquired four 9.1gb scsi harddrives and a scsi pci controller card. Even after just running them i had many ideas running through my mind. Usualy eatch scsi would boot up one by one, you can sometimes add a new harddrive into an allready created array, depending on hardware, software, config, and whatnot. Servers usualy have onboard SCSI controllers which then let you configure the scsi harddrives without an OS because you need a working harddrive before a working OS.