Compulopnik Data Debacle 

"uofime-2" (uofime-2) 11/10/2015 at 15:47 • Filed to: None

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Behold the glory that is my HTPC which at this point in its life cycle is affectionately referred to as “shit-box”.

It truly is the computer equivalent of a 25 year old brown manual turbo diesel wagon.

It was built from the bones of a 2004 best buy “Insignia” special. It still retains the original 450w power supply and dual CD and DVD parallel ATA drives, but the engine was torn out and replaced with basically the cheapest thing you could get in 2010, an E3300 Celeron, backed by a micro ATX “transmission” with the legacy support to retain those IDE drives.

She’s got 4 GBs of DDR2 RAM and with 32bit Windows XP SP3 she can use most of it.

Storage was always the highlight of the build, starting with 2TB, after a year and a half the need arose for another 2TB.

Alas after 5 years of nearly constant service ( I pretty much never turn it off) the sleeve bearings in the CPU cooler have started to fail which has meant for the last six months its been hanging at an angle out of its garage so the bearings will be quiet.

Last week though there was another bad noise coming from under the hood, which to an experienced mechanic could only mean one thing. One of the hard drives is failing. I didn’t confirm which, but with the system drive being a 7200 and almost 2 years older, it’s a pretty safe guess. A new drive was ordered and in the 3 years since the last one was bought drives have gotten bigger and the price has stayed the same so the replacement has a 5TB capacity.

That leaves me with my dilemma, how should I set up the new drive. This computer, in approximately this configuration at least, isn’t long for the world. So do I bother splitting the drive into 3 less than 2GB partitions so XP can read it or just call the computer toast and move the drives to my CAD/gaming rig to complete the transfer and send the shitbox out to pasture until I rebuild it?

bob and john > uofime-2 11/10/2015 at 15:51

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call it day for that machine

MonkeePuzzle > uofime-2 11/10/2015 at 15:53

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oooo, says gigabyte! that sounds fast!

TheHondaBro > uofime-2 11/10/2015 at 15:53

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You ever think your HTPC will live up to its name?

Tripper > uofime-2 11/10/2015 at 15:54

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Move the drives and can that beast.

JGrabowMSt > uofime-2 11/10/2015 at 16:00

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Send that thing out to pasture. Get a streaming NAS for your smart TV.

Life is so much nicer that way.

Mr. Ontop, No Strokes, No Smokes...Goes Fast. > uofime-2 11/10/2015 at 16:01

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I think, for me personally, I’d just go with a q-box quad core preloaded with kodi and a few add ons and call it a day.

Mr. Ontop, No Strokes, No Smokes...Goes Fast. > MonkeePuzzle 11/10/2015 at 16:02

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It’s the modern version of “Turbo”

uofime-2 > TheHondaBro 11/10/2015 at 16:04

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I don’t have any pets and I haven’t drank those kind of quantities for quite a while so..... probably not

uofime-2 > JGrabowMSt 11/10/2015 at 16:07

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This computer has the software to function that way. The problem is that the interface/aps on smart tv’s/playstations/xbox ect kind of sucks compared to just using the computer so the computer lives on attached to the tv with a wireless keyboard/mouse.

uofime-2 > MonkeePuzzle 11/10/2015 at 16:08

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oh yeah, it’s real fast!

uofime-2 > Mr. Ontop, No Strokes, No Smokes...Goes Fast. 11/10/2015 at 16:12

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I fooled around with XBMC a bit back in the day. It was always kind of clunky and had a bad habit of memory leaks and subsequent crashes (they’ve probably fixed those) so my conclusion was that it was just easier to use the regular computer interface.

Furthermore acquiring content always meant using the regular computer anyway so it really wasn’t worth it.

uofime-2 > bob and john 11/10/2015 at 16:16

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Probably what will happen, but after transfering the data I might just reinstall the drives and continue using until it actually fails.

Any thing new can just be put on the non-system drive so if that fails I won’t actually lose anything.

Hmmm, although that would mean throwing away my back up for all my old data if the new drive ever fails...

Mr. Ontop, No Strokes, No Smokes...Goes Fast. > uofime-2 11/10/2015 at 16:26

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It is a lot better now. I have a low end laptop that I use just to run it and it’s much better than it was even just a year or two ago. Check it out.

uofime-2 > Mr. Ontop, No Strokes, No Smokes...Goes Fast. 11/10/2015 at 16:30

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I remember it used to make my laptop fans go full bore playing regular res video. You say they’ve fixed it huh? maybe I’ll give it another shot once I get the chance

Mr. Ontop, No Strokes, No Smokes...Goes Fast. > uofime-2 11/10/2015 at 16:36

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I haven’t had a problem with it on mine and I run it on about the lowest spec Asus you can get. Nice & Smooth, clean picture. The fans didn’t seem to do any overtime.

R Saldana [|Oo|======|oO|] - BTC/ETH/LTC Prophet > uofime-2 11/10/2015 at 17:01

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Why not just put windows 7 on an SSd as a new HTPC build?

uofime-2 > R Saldana [|Oo|======|oO|] - BTC/ETH/LTC Prophet 11/10/2015 at 17:08

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An SSD for a HTPC seems like a waste of money, but it is definitely a consideration when I go to rebuild this box, which will pretty much need everything replaced, maybe even the box.

R Saldana [|Oo|======|oO|] - BTC/ETH/LTC Prophet > uofime-2 11/10/2015 at 20:26

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I have an X99 build impending and planned for January next year.

uofime-2 > R Saldana [|Oo|======|oO|] - BTC/ETH/LTC Prophet 11/11/2015 at 10:23

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That thing will be the polar opposite of this box!

Mine will be an 1151 as soon as they release a low power chip on that socket, which will probably be early next year.

R Saldana [|Oo|======|oO|] - BTC/ETH/LTC Prophet > uofime-2 11/11/2015 at 10:56

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I’ve been putting off building my own desktop for about 10 years, due to moving around a lot.

uofime-2 > R Saldana [|Oo|======|oO|] - BTC/ETH/LTC Prophet 11/11/2015 at 12:15

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You don’t have to build something as monsterous as what you’re planning!

You’d be amazed what a 40$ processor can do

R Saldana [|Oo|======|oO|] - BTC/ETH/LTC Prophet > uofime-2 11/11/2015 at 12:50

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lol, but I am a sysadmin and need the broad scope of abilities that an x99 build will achieve.

spanfucker retire bitch > uofime-2 11/12/2015 at 10:46

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That’s an insanely large machine for an HTPC. You should replace it with an mITX build and move those HDDs into a NAS enclosure. Something like an Intel i3 or AMD APU, 4-8GB of RAM and a 64GB to 128GB SSD with Windows 10 as the OS (the “tablet mode” makes a GREAT 10ft UI) and you’re golden.

It’ll be way more quiet and use way less power than your current HTPC, and you get the advantage of the HDDs being placed in some closet somewhere inside of a low powered Atom or ARM NAS enclosure.

uofime-2 > spanfucker retire bitch 11/12/2015 at 11:06

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I’ve thought about using a NUC and a NAS but that’s more computers, more money and likely more problems.

This box is actually quite low power, 40w processor and a 90w gpu which is pretty much always at idle.

The box fits in my entertainment center fine and I had it so the free choice has been obvious. That said when I go to build a new one if I find a good cheap mITX solution I may got with it.

My other computer is an Elite 130, which actually doesn’t fit as well as this since its slightly taller and has a vent on top.

The current plan is to wait for Intel to release a low power chip on the new 1151 socket and build with that.

I’ll have to put 10 in a VM and try it out I really haven’t looked at it yet. Reading explorer windows is somewhat difficult so that may be a nice improvement.

spanfucker retire bitch > uofime-2 11/12/2015 at 11:11

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Why are you reading explorer Windows on your TV? Don’t you use a home theater player like Plex, XBMC (natch, Kodi), Media Portal or anything else?

I think you’re making it harder on yourself if you’re using a video player like VLC, or MPC, or WMP or something along those lines with an HTPC hooked up to a TV.

uofime-2 > spanfucker retire bitch 11/12/2015 at 11:22

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Some one said XBMC has improved massively in the last two years, but the last time I used it, it was clunky and crash prone. I’ve got all my files pretty well organized so it was just easier to do it this way.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > uofime-2 01/22/2016 at 11:05

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Celeron

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > uofime-2 01/22/2016 at 11:07

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I just stream Netflix from the nearest available laptop.

uofime-2 > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 01/22/2016 at 11:31

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You would be shocked at the things that turd has done. It runs proEngineer just fine, even with massive assembly models. It ran Ansys and Mechanica FEA simulations.

I played some games on that computer, Skyrim, TF2, Portal 2, it ran remarkably OK @720p.

Funny story related to your case somewhat, I originally tried to upgrade the computer originally sold in the case, a pentium 4, just to be a basic HTPC, put in a GPU, RAM, and a big HDD. It ran horribly, couldn’t deal with 720P video at all, ( I was broke in college) so I bought the cheapest replacement internals CPU, mobo, memory, 9 months later th3 gt430 GPU. I could find and was thoroughly shocked by what the box could do.

Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo > uofime-2 01/22/2016 at 15:43

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Would you consider continuing this dialogue via email?

oliphant.chuckerbutty@gmail.com

That’s an alias, obviously...

uofime-2 > Rusty Vandura - www.tinyurl.com/keepoppo 01/22/2016 at 16:53

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email sent