AWS

I've bought parts from many places. What I do is hit http://www.pricewatch.com and compare prices.

If you plan of expanding in the future you would be better of getting a dual cpu box. As a site grows it out grows the server. Better to get something better when you start instead of buying or building new servers as the site grows. You don't have to have the latest and greatest. This site, up until yesterday, was running on a dual Xeon 550Mhz box. This site is now on a dual P3 1Ghz box, the same box ExVBF was on until I went to Dual Xeon 2.4Ghz. Before I sold the site I had moved it back to the dual p3 box, a different one that I am getting ready to sell on Ebay along with the dual 550, after some drive problems. It performed well. I would say get your self a dual 500+ with fast scsi drives and you'll be good for a long time. It will be a cheaper alternative to a new single P4 2.4Ghz or higher HT enabled box or an AMD 64 box and will serve you well.

Ram has nothing to do with video. Reseat the video card. If you have onboard vid then put an agp or pci card in and disable onboard in bios. While the odds of having multiple sticks of bad memory it can happen. Also could bethe memory isn't compatible with the board.

If this is an Awrd bios a series of beeps means a video problem or bad memory stick. If it is another bios check out this page to check your bios beep codes. http://www.pcguide.com/ts/x/sys/beep/

Check that you have the correct mime type setup.

Server move is complete. If you are connected to IRC you will want to reconnect to get to the new server.

DNS is no changed for the IRC server. You shouldn't notice the change. You might get disconnected for a minute when DNS propagates. I had to get this done fast and couldn't wait for this evening. I have to get the current server offline.

The site is switched. DNS should only take a few minutes to propagate. The IRC server will be moved at the scheduled time list above.

The site and irc server will be down for approximately one hour starting at 11:00PM CST tonight. I have to do some minor network maintenance to get ready for the IP switch.

I did what you are going to do twice with Windows 2000. I went from ATA to SCSI the first time. Didn't have a problem. When Windows booted the first time it installed the scsi drivers. I also did this after I changed from one computer to the other. This was a SCSI to ATA change. As long as there is a native driver in WinXP for SATA you shouldn't have a problem. Worse case is do a repair with the install cd.

The forum and site will be down for maintenance. I'll post the date for this as soon as my upstream provider gets back to me with the new IP information. The downtime should be minimal. This will also affect the IRC server.

You've got a bad stick of ram or your ram isn't seated correctly. I had the same problem and had a hard time finding the problem. After doing the same thing you did I opened the case and one of the sticks of ram was just slightly unseated. After reseating the ram the problem went away.

Yes. Use host headers to create your subdomains.

Linux laptop support was always good. They are just making it better. With earlier versions of Redhat I would have an easier time getting all the hardware working on my laptop than on my desktop.

I had it on my hard drive, think it came with phpnuke, and decided to put it up with MS stories until I can grab some images off MS site.

It's done. Let me know what you think. I have the main part done. There still might be a few pages that I missed so let me know if you find any. That style is temporary. Sometime in the future I will be holding a competition with first prize being a full license to vBulletin to the person that creates a style for the site.

I'm Bob Schwarz, Sr. I was the founder and owner of http://visualbasicforum.com and http://dotnetforums.net up until I sold them both in November 2003. Running the backend for 2 large programming forums was getting to be too big of a job for one person. After the transfer of ownership I found I had a lot of free time on my hands so I started an off topic forum, http://whatpissesyouoff.com, to have something to do. A couple weeks later I got the idea to start a technical news site and forum. I bought http://extremetechsupport.com, http://extremetechsupport.net and http://extremetechsupport.org. My son Brandon, who is a member here used to tell me that I should start a tech site. I took him up on it and created Free PC Help Forum. With this site I am more in my element, troubleshooting, building and maintaining systems. I live in Western Illinois. I'm married and have 5 children, 3 boys and 2 girls. Ages from 19 to 24. The youngest daughter, she is 22, is married and hopefully in the near future will make a young grandfather. My 2 oldest sons and oldest daughter live with their mother, my first wife. My youngest son lives with my wife and I. I started out with computer when I was 17. My school had an IBM mainframe and on that I learned to program in Fortran. I picked up a Commodore 64 in early 1980 and while I was working to get my Amatuer Radio license I programmed a morse code generator in Basic to help me learn the code. After I passed the license tests I coded a few other Ham related programs. Right around 1985 I got my first taste of Unix. Had a Sun box running AIX. I ported my previous programs to run on it in C. I also ran a bbs off it. In the old days there was no such thing as an ISP. You connected to other peoples computers that ran a bbs service. I also had an IBM 3086 with Dos 6 installed and later that year I upgraded it to Windows 3.1 so my family could use it. They didn't like the command line as much as I did. A couple years after that I discovered a service called Q-Link, later to become AOL. This was much better than the old bbs that were popular ways to get and exchange info. All the premium service were pay by the minute, still it was much better than bbs. My family got a lot of enjoyment out of it and it was a way to exchange software with other Ham Radio nuts. It was much easier trading a program I made to get another program that I needed. Saved a lot of coding. I was away from computers for a few years and din't get back into it until I got married a second time. I had let my kids keep my computers after I was divorced. My wife, Pat, had a HP 4086 with Windows 3.1. We upgraded it to Windows 95 as soon as it was released. By this time the net was in full swing and I was like a kid in a candy store. So much knowledge and information and I couldn't get enough of it. I set up a website on my ISP server. A ham radio site off course. It was a good learning experience. We gave the old HP to Brandon and bought a new Packard Bell Pentium 233. After a few months we realized we needed another computer. My wife and I were both active online and we just couldn't find an easy way to split the time on the computer. We bought here a Celeron 500 box. It was about this time that we realized we could build a box for half the price. This realization came after we upgraded the processor on my wifes box to a 1Gig P3. I had an AMD T-Bird 700 with a bad motherboard. We went to a computer show and bought a new board and I rebuilt it. Soon after we were hooked. We build a number of computers for relatives and friends and all the servers that run this site and used to run ExVBF and EDN. My wife does most of the building now. She is a hands on person and the arguments we used to get in when building just wasn't worth it so I let her build and then I install all the software. In my garage we have 20 or so computers. Someday we'll get them all repaired and put them for sale. Right now we have 7 or so computers hooked up in the house. 3 servers, my workstation, my wifes box and Brandons workstation and game server. My wife also has 2 laptops. He builds his own now and if it comes to overclocking and modding he is the man to talk to. Maybe I'll ask him to post up a few tutorials and a few pics of some of the mods he did. That's enough for now. Later on I'll post an article detailing the server specs complete with pics.

I'm starting work on the news pages. If the colors or table alignment doesn't look right it's because I am making a style that is the same as what is used for the forum. Some things might look strange and change real fast. I have to test as I go.

Raid 0 = striping = one drive goes bad all data lost. Raid 1 = mirroring = one drive goes bad no data lost.

You must be getting a cached page. There are there.

I use them both. AMD as desktop and Intel as servers.

Suse and Mandrake have a x86/64 port.

Got them up. Chat is up also.

Excelent. I'll add them while I'm setting up the chat page.