It\’s been an interesting week I must say. One that deserves some writeup in the blog. JR had a very good week in just about every respect. We got 2 new clients. We had 3 or 4 clients pay us significant amounts of money. We had 2 new servers installed and implex and the third one was moved with only 4 minutes of downtime. We upgraded Spam Assassin, but I think it needs to be retrained because I think it\’s doing a worse job than before. All in all, if every week was like this now, it would be great. Of course, that\’s not the way life works.
Many of you have noticed that the video test has been off more than one lately. Sorry about that. I only turn it on when I bring my laptop to MSA now. I don\’t have it plugged in to the beast at the moment because I thought flash was crashing my computer. It turns out, I may have been wrong. I should have been taking my own advice… let me explain.
When I go and fix someones computer, I often find that their problem is the hard drive is too full. One person imparticular stands out in my mind for when I went to look at his computer he had 10 megs of free space… Windows XP will not like that at all. My normal recommendation is to keep it at least about 5% free, or 15% of you can do it. Now, I never had actually looked up these numbers. They were more of a guess based on personal experience. In fact, somewhere in the back of my mind, the percent of freespace did not matter. It was the amount of freespace. That was of course what my computer science mind would expect.
Turns out I was somewhat right, but I\’m not entirely sure why. I knew my performance was not up to par with where it normally was. I started looking for causes. I thought maybe my ram was acting up again, what not… Didn\’t seem to matter. The computer would still function just fine, but it was a little slow to open things like my documents as well as a little more prone to crashing. I looked towards the hard drive. At first glance, I was fine. 15+ Gigs free.
I looked again. 3% FREE?!?! I wondered if it was that I had fallen below that magical 5% mark where I swear windows had always slowed down. Actually, my initial guess was that I needed to defrag. Turns out though you need a certain percentage of disk space to do that ;-). So I started deleting things. 86 gigs later I was back close to 25% free. Everything was running faster. My Documents still takes a little bit to load (probably has something to do with the massive sized folders below it.) but overall, it works really well. So people, I\’m thinking the 5% is really 5%.
I\’m still thinking though I should check out my raid card.
In other news, I\’m heading north today to go to a party for my Grandma Kathy. She\’s not really my grandma, but she raised me and my sister from the ages of 1 to 6 maybe longer in some cases. She was our day care provider while my parents worked. It\’s where I learned to play Super Nintendo, work on a Apple II, and just have fun building forts. I haven\’t built forts in awhile… I should do that. She\’s celebrating her 50th wedding aniversary, very cool.
The Nintendo Revolution controller is out if you haven\’t seen it. It\’s one handed with attachments that can make it two handed. It\’s wireless. It\’s gyro\’d meaning you can use it like a sword. All in all, it\’s going to be different and unique. It will be interesting to see if the other video game systems try to follow suit, or if Nintendo\’s Innovation pays off.
I think I better go get a start on my day. I should really try to start updating more, and I need to remember to keep business cards in my wallet. I keep having dreams about how I never have them when I need them.