Always a Bigger Fish
Well, I thought my bandwidth was really good at home. I was wrong. Just for kicks and giggles I tested the bandwidth at the church. Well, the churches connection is just a little better than mine.
The upload speed is pretty much the same as mine which indicates to me that it is capped right around 700 to 705 kbps. The download speed is the huge differance. The church got a 1.5MB/sec transfer rate. Where do I sign up?
Comcast Connection
I decided to check the speed of my Comcast connection today. I went to the Speakeasy Speed Test which seemed to work fairly well. I was very happy with my results. I got my best results with the Speakeasy server. I got several other servers telling me I had a 1.5 mbps connection. I knew it was better than that.
Here’s what I got from Speakeasy.net.
I tested my bandwidth ten times and figured out what the average of the test came up to.
Average Download Speed: 6696.7 kbps
Average Upload Speed: 701.1 kbps
The fastest speeds I saw were very cool. Here’s what I saw.
Max Download Speed: 7445 kbps (924 KB/sec transfer rate)
Max Upload Speed: 705 kbps (87.9 KB/sec transfer rate)
That 7446 kbps dowload speed is still not what I’m supposed to be getting. The internet access I am paying for is supposed to be 8 mbps. That is 7.45 mbps. I wonder if I should call them and complain.
Debit Card Fraud
CAUTION: Long Post.
I am once again the victim of debit card fraud. I couple years ago I had someone in Russia get hold of my card number and order a bunch of classical music. I can’t remember how much money it was, but I caught it quick and the company that the order was made through fairly quickly returned my money. I varified the card number to them and they just put the money right back into my account. It was a hassle to have to change all of my auto drafts to the new card, but that was the end of that.
Saturday night last week, that would be Saturday the 8th of September, I looked at my online banking and noticed a $500 charge. You could say I was a little more than curious. I’m on a “can’t spend money because I’m saving for a motorcycle” kick, so I knew there is no way I would have spent $500 without remembering what for, not that any other time I would forget spending $500 before it had even completely posted to my account.
As soon as I found the charge I went to my banks website and found the 800 number to cancel the card. The entry on my online banking looked like this.
| POS @ EPASSPORTE.COM CALL 310-301-2001 | $500.00 |
I contacted ePassporte.com and told them that the charge was not valid. The man I spoke to locked the account down to make sure no further activity would take place on the account. He sent it on to their fraud department to be investigated.
General Computer Update
A lot has happened lately with my computers. The hard drive from the file server is confirmed dead. Whatever data is on that drive is gone. There is no way to recover it without shelling out some serious money.
On another note I’ve been having problems with my desktop computer. It was becoming more and more unstable. I figured it was a Windows problem, and on a machine running Windows that’s a safe bet.
I would have lost that bet. It turns out my video card is in process of dieing. I did a full format reinstall to see if it would fix the unstable nature of the box, and at first it seemed to. I rebooted early this morning and it would not boot back up. It would lock up when Windows tried to load the video drivers. I tried several times before going into safe mode. While in safe mode I uninstalled my video card drivers and it rebooted normally. I then went and downloaded the latest video drivers from NVIDIA and installed them. After rebooting I tried to change my resolution and it locked up. Ever time I try anything other than 800×600 it locks up. It seems that I will now be useing a very small resolution for a while.
This really sucks because I am saving for a motorcycle. I have money for that, but not to repair a computer. I hate to buy a new video card for this computer. It’s still an AGP, and I can’t find anything worth buying to go in an AGP slot. It looks like I’m being pushed into upgrading my computer sooner than I wanted to.
File Server Update
It seems that the Raid card was dead. The primary channel quit on me and I had to order a new card. I got the new card and installed it today. My trouble shooting led me to believe this because I lost both the Primary Master and the Primary Slave drives at the same time. Of a four drive raid I thought in unlikely that I would lose two drives at the same time. I was right.
After installing the new card I don’t get the error message that tells me both drives on the primary channel are not responding. Now it’s just the primary master. So I end up right back where I started. I have one non functional raid because I lost one drive. It looks ever more unlikely that I will be able to save my data. If I can’t get that drive to work I can’t even make an image of it to try to unstripe the raid. I doubt there is anything I can do personally to recover my stuff. There are data recovery centers that can open the hard drive and remove the platters to recover the data, but that is very expensive. As much as I hate to lose all of my pictures I’ve taken, I can’t justify spending $1000 or more to recover them.
Ken Wendland 