The Techno-Cave

[Don Alexander]

Thread necromancy alert!!!

So... I guess this belongs here.

Anybody do BOINC?

Back when it was still a standalone application, I took part in SETI@home. Finally got around 7800 work units done, which landed me in the top 1% of all users. My user name was - and is for all my other projects - Zubenelgenubi, the proper name of Alpha Librae, meaning the "southern claw [of the Scorpion]".

When BOINC appeared, I continued with SETI@home, but soon switched to other projects (only my mom's computer at her home is still running it - though it seems to have stopped running a while ago, will have to check into that... ). I did a bit for LHC@home, and, to occupy my comp while it spent long times offline (back before we got a WLAN at home), I got into Climateprediction.net and the BBC Climate Experiment, where workunits take two to three months of solid computer time... My experiences with those were not so good, I lost several workunits (and huge amounts of credits ) to program crashes...

Finally, I switched to Einstein@home, a search for gravitational wave signals. As an astrophysicist, I of course want to support astronomical and physical projects. E@h has been running for years now on both my work comp and my home comp, and I have over 560,000 credits, which places me in the top 0.1% of all participants!!

Recently, they had a terrible system crash, and the project is totally offline. Starved for work units, I initiated two rather new projects: MilkyWay@home (which computes the orbits of stellar streams around the Milky Way core) and Cosmology@home, which somehow computes evolving universes assuming certain initial parameters...

Today, I had a look at my task manager, and my jaw dropped when I saw the Cosmology@home executables were eating several hundred MEGABYTES each - record so far that I've seen was 900! So now, each time they start up, my comp slows down quite a bit, because the swap file has to be accessed all the time...

On my work comp, which must be idling right now because it's run out of Einstein@home work units , I'll definitely only run MilkyWay@home. While it has 2 GB RAM, it's much older and would just creep...

This boring piece of techno-babble was brought to you by the Don!

[Radbaron]

RadBaron since day one

Total credit 308,489
Recent average credit 554.16
SETI@home classic workunits 2,559
SETI@home classic CPU time 21,980 hours

--------------------------------------------
name ............... total credit....average credit........ since
Einstein@Home 163,811 ..... 1,191 ... 20 Feb 2005
SETI@home 307,324 .... 483 .......1 Dec 1999
LHC@home 3,895 ...0 ....12 Aug 2008

As you can see, I am also doing the Large Hadron Collider Array work as well

[Don Alexander]

HA!!!

I knew you'd be involved!!! ;)



*



* and no Myaoi involved

[MarkMoriquendi]

Techno Cave? Why didn't i notice this before?
*hooks himself up to a mainframe and turns the crankhandle* ah power.... I think this sun and heat has made me go a little crazy. I think my neurobionics are shot
*mackerel*

[Bear]

We hid it with our stealth technology... Its called Page 2 lol.

[Bear]

This item. Didn't the Simpsons come up with something similar over 10 years ago?

[Otaku201]

This item. Didn't the Simpsons come up with something similar over 10 years ago?

Holy fuck. Someone call Matt Groening.

[Bear]

Just what I was thinking.

[MarkMoriquendi]

We hid it with our stealth technology... Its called Page 2 lol.

damn you and your Mod-Tech

[JVDifferent]

And now it's time again for JVD to have a computer problem once more, and pitch it to the Grand Elder Geeks of the Techno Cave.

I am trying to update my drivers, but this is proving to be a more difficult endeavour than I imagined. The only driver I really want to update is the CD Drive one, because currently my CD Drive is not recognizing any CDs I shove in there. It twirls them around a little, and then does nothing. Not even a blip on My Computer. But getting all the other outdated drivers on this machine updated would be nice.

I have tried...
1) Going to NEC.com, and downloading the official drivers for this particular model of laptop. (NEC Versa L2100) When I tried to click open the driver's .exe file, something called WinZip Self-Extractor tells me it can't create an output file. Bwa?
2) Downloading programs like Driver Detective and Driver Robot. They all let me scan my dodgy drivers for free, but want me to pay US$29.95 for the privilege of getting them updated. Fuck that noise.

Suggestions?

[MarkMoriquendi]

I have no idea why Winzip can't create it's output file.... Lack of disk space maybe?
And are you using an internal cd drive (i only ask because my laptop doesn't have one)
It could be that your drive is knackered. To be technical. Or on the less drastic side, needs cleaning. Always worth a try....

[JVDifferent]

The machine has a little over 10GB of disk space, and 1GB of RAM.

The problem could be that it is just the shittiest personal laptop in all creation.

[Radbaron]

Download the file. Save & Exit all application in windows This part might be important!! That usually includes virus software, IE/Fox , Skype (especially).

I looked at the site, couldnt see any drivers for the CDRom. Which location did you choose from?

Edit: update WinZip as well

[Don Alexander]

I've never had to close much of anything to run an installation...

Mel, if you drop me the adress, I can download it and see if I can unpack it.

[Azrael]

Are we sure it's a software problem, JVD and not hardware? In other words, might the CD-ROM unit itself be borked?