Thoughts from recent CoffeeBreaks:
Windows 7 on MSI K9N Platinum (nForce 570 SLI)
Recently, a fresh Windows install[1] was due on my home PC primarily used by my parents and family after my switch to a MacBook about a year ago.
However, whenever I tried to start the installation routine, the setup would boot into the "Windows is starting"-screen with the nicely animated glowing 7-logo[2], but stay there indefinitely without an error message. When starting the setup in safe mode (I had to press F5 or F6 during start-up IIRC), the setup would just hang after
Loaded: \Windows\system32\drivers\disk.sys
I started searching the internet for similar problems and found a couple of recommendations related to nForce chipsets. Some told you to disable your on-board LAN ports (which I happen not using anyway) and a lot of similar disable-some-hardware tips, which, unfortunately, did not help at all. I had almost given up on Windows 7 and re-installed XP, when I decided to try a BIOS-update as a last resort. After using MSI's rather comfortable LiveUpdate[3] the Windows 7 setup did work fine[4].
- [1]: MSDN-AA is one of the benefits of being a student
- [2]: http://images.google.de/images?q=Windows%207%20boot%20screen
- [3]: It's an Internet Explorer Active-X plug-in optimized for IE5 and 800x600, but other than that, it works pretty good. I can even update your BIOS from within the OS (does a hard reset after finishing, but that's probably the better alternative to shutting down on a possibly non-working BIOS)
- [4]: Sorry for the excessive usage of footnotes
RapidShare. Completely unusable?
RapidShare is changing it’s free download limits (as in speed, time and size) like others are changing their underwear. Their current setup however, is the worst I’ve experienced so far and makes RapidShare almost completely unusable without a client software.
I had to reload about 20 times and wait around 15 minutes, before I even got a download ticket. I had to wait 90 seconds after I got the ticket for the download to finally start. For each reload I had to click twice, after I got the ticket it took another click to start the download. In total, that sums up to 20 * 2 + 1 = 41 clicks on a website that advertises itself as “1-CLICK Web hosting - Easy Filehosting”.
The download itself took 43 minutes 25 seconds for a total of 114.83 MiB, that’s about 45.14 KiB per second. Compare that to a test download I did from a full-speed server that delivered 657.37 KiB/s for a 30.6 MiB file in 48 seconds. That’s more than 1400% as fast as a download from RapidShare, not counting the waiting time.
The numbers speak for themselves – in my opinion RapidShare is completely unusable at the moment (and even more for less tech-savvy people than for me).
Bon Appetit at the Erlangen canteen
It’s no secret the canteen on the Erlangen university’s southern campus is not the best – but I haven’t seen something like that before.
A little bit disgusting if you ask me – I was lucky, it wasn’t my meal, though…
