Over the last week I have been building a media server for our home from an old PIII 450 machine. Obviously this machine was a little lacking when I acquired it, it was free so I’m not complaining! I bought myself 512MB of PC133 SD RAM (which is the maximum the motherboard would take) to replace the 256MB installed, a second Realtek RTL8139D network card as an Internet connection sharing NIC for use as a proxy so I can use the BBC iPlayer on the Playstation3. So far all is good; then we come to the problem child, a VIA based PCI USB2.0 card. Which not only doesn’t work with my Hitachi external hard disk, it corrupted the disk meaning I had to spend over two hours repairing the drive with Scandisk on my laptop Windows 7 install. I have spent a further 12 hours looking into a workaround to get it to work reliably without success. I have tried everything from registry hacking to installing different drivers to changing PCI latency in the BIOS and hard disk settings, even tried installing ActiveSync (despite not owning a Windows phone) as recommended on the VIAarena forums all without success. There seems to be some conflict/issue with Windows 2000/XP and the VIA based USB2.0 chipset. I had to conduct a good comparison of HDD vs. SSD. I have now bought a new NEC based USB2.0 PCI card which was recommended by many users on various forums, let’s see if that fixes the issues I am having as accessing the external HDD through USB1.1 is painful, less than 1Mbps transfer speeds, compared to the 480Mbps possible from USB2.0. This whole situation is frustrating as this should have been a simple setup procedure and now I will have to wait another week for the new USB2.0 card, the USPS isn’t exactly swift in delivery often taking a week to travel up one state!
The truth is out about Fernando Alonso’s drive-through penalty at Silverstone. Ferrari and/or Alonso elected to ignore race director Charlie Whiting’s request to allow Robert Kubica to re-pass after Alonso cut the corner gaining an advantage. Whiting issued the request three times; and on the third and final time, Ferrari radioed back stating that Alonso was too far ahead now to concede the place back to the Pole. So in my opinion, Ferrari and/or Alonso tried to cheat and got punished for it, just the same as Hamilton did in the previous race! The rules are clear, if a driver gains an advantage by cutting a corner he must lift off to allow the driver passed back through! Alonso didn’t do that, so I think that Ferrari need to stop blowing hot air and go racing!