Originally posted by Mr-Movies:

---

Originally posted by omegaman7:

---

Originally posted by Mr-Movies:

---

ASUS have an excellent display very vibrant and crisp, way to go.

---

I don't know if I'd give the credit to Asus :p Everybody buys the panels from distributors. And the Asus monitor I bought my mother may have a tough road ahead of it. I got her the 23.6 monitor. I recently input the command to have the monitor sleep after 10min of inactivity. When it comes back on, the backlight acts funny. It flickers. My samsung does not do that. Or perhaps I'm nitpicking. Don't get me wrong though. There are manufacturers out there, that seem to sell some pretty dire lcd monitors. No doubt they get the last pickins from the distributor?

Hey russ, remember that Thermaltake Sata dock you recommended and I bought? Oops! LOL! I'm housesitting my brothers house, and I had the device sitting on the floor in front of their HDTV. On top of their entertainment stand is a Scented wax contraption, that heats the wax, allowing scents to fill their home. I decided at one point last night to check if it had anything in it. I was almost certain it was empty given the length of time that had transpired. Nope! I tipped it toward me, and a substantial amount poored out of it, and on to my poor hard drive and sata dock. Thankfully it cooled so fast, it didn't cause any damage. Freaked me out big time though. I had my "Zoe" hard drive with me. That would have irritated me big time. Thankfully it wasn't scented oil. Would have wrecked it for sure!

---

It is true that there are 5 monitor makers for companies to select from however that is a mood point really. Any manufacture may use one or all of them to build their flat panels so I'm not sure what the relevance is in that statement.

There are bad Sammy's too, just like ViewSonic can make a great monitor and have a shatty one as well. Also pixel size, contrast/brightness, and so on? specs don't always determine that a display will be good or not. There are other factors involved so if you have a high quality, let?s say larger pixel ? less resolution, flat panel it can still look better than a low quality, smaller pixel ? higher resolution, display. Just like statistics specs don't always tell the whole story. This is really true in the Audio world!

I use to buy Scepter monitors too, I had the Komodo 19", several models, and they were good while they worked. The screen was sharp but not as vibrant as a better quality flat panel. Still the price was right and they worked well for the short time of their life span, mine were around 4-5 years too. I also have an old NEC MultiSync LCD1830 - LCD display - TFT (Active) - 18.1 that is over 10 years old now, the resolution is much less than today?s monitors but it is still a very nice monitor and will probably work for another 5 years. Of all of my many monitors Scepters? died out first and I have one value line ViewSonic that is acting up too. My 24? (16:10/1920x1200) Sammy is my nicest monitor but my cheap Auria 24? (16:9/1920x1080) is pretty darn nice too even though the speakers on it suck. So again what?s on paper doesn?t always matter and it is always better to test drive a monitor before buying it, just like in the audio world.

---

Originally posted by rick5446:

---

Well I've tried 2 different Drives, 4 different USB PORTS ...ALL to No Avail, it still wants to list my BlacX as a CD Drive..The only one out of 8,.Why this particular one, just don't know.I've just D/L the drivers from THERMALTAKE have to wait till morning to reboot and see if that works
THANKS EVERYBODY FOR YOUR HELP
Hey Russ good luck with your NEW Monitor, let us know how you like it..I just,last week got my 23.5 ASUS LED Mon and am luving it...VERY CRISP

---

Originally posted by ddp:

---

have a read of this. http://forums.afterdawn.com/t.cfm/f-216/building_a_custom_computer-891575/

---

Originally posted by ddp:

---

no problem. do a search of his nic so you can read his other threads & you'll see why i posted this link.

---

Originally posted by omegaman7:

---

Originally posted by ddp:

---

no problem. do a search of his nic so you can read his other threads & you'll see why i posted this link.

---

LOL, I already understand ;)

Perhaps you remember Rawstyles.

---

Originally posted by ddp:

---

nothing in my hotmail except for non-eatable spam.

---

Originally posted by omegaman7:

---

For those involved with my Hard drive situation, here's a little something interesting. My primary windows machine seems to think that the 5000AAKS drive that I'm working on, is completely empty. When windows acknowledges the drive for the brief moment that it does, it shows 100% free space. THat's rather curious. There's some definite miscommunication going on here...
While I realize that I should give up on the drive, I really don't like that idea :p That would make me a quitter. Besides, I wanna save the day here ;)

---

Originally posted by Mr-Movies:

---

I very well doubt it is a head crash issue and number of platters, one or three or five, is pretty much irrelevant really. It sounds more like the controller board in the drive is going bad but that is also tough to say exactly. Not a good sign regardless.

---

Originally posted by omegaman7:

---

If the head had hit the platters, wouldn't smart statistics say so(Reallocated sector counts)? Because this failure has been progressively getting worse for about 2 weeks now. And last time the drive was working-ish the day before yesterday, the smart statistics checked out ok. I'm not trying to argue. I'm trying to understand ;) In any case, we have another AAKS drive on hand, to attempt to swap PCB's. We just can't throw away 2yrs of pics, without exhausting all options. Short of spending a ridiculous amount of money, to have a professional take it in a clean room, and do their thing ;)

Russ, I entertained the idea, that if a chip were bad enough, it could send inappropriate amounts of voltage, causing burns. Granted this would be a rare worse case scenario ;)

---

Originally posted by theonejrs:

---

Originally posted by Mr-Movies:

---

I very well doubt it is a head crash issue and number of platters, one or three or five, is pretty much irrelevant really. It sounds more like the controller board in the drive is going bad but that is also tough to say exactly. Not a good sign regardless.

---

Mr-Movies,

With all due respect, the tell-tale is the empty drive, which means the bios chip is intact, but the file allocation isn't. It's just reading the raw drive spec. In 22 years of building computers, I've only see this a few times, and all the indications are that there is physical damage to the drive, more than likely caused by head contact with the platter. It would also explain why the drive vanishes after a few seconds of running. I suspect that a head has gone dead short and caused the burns dead shorting to the platter. It would also explain the power draw from the drive and the burning on the controller board. Even if the controller chip burned out, it wouldn't burn the board where the burn occurred. Generally there's just a small puff of smoke and the chip dies, without any further damage. The fact that the drive runs and identifies itself tells me it's not the controller because when the chip does burn out they are always totally dead, and don't even spin up, because it needs the chip to tell it to spin up and then un-park the heads. That plus the chip itself could never draw enough power to cause the Damage that Oman7 showed me earlier.

Respectfully,
Russ

---

Originally posted by Mr-Movies:

---

Originally posted by theonejrs:

---

Originally posted by Mr-Movies:

---

I very well doubt it is a head crash issue and number of platters, one or three or five, is pretty much irrelevant really. It sounds more like the controller board in the drive is going bad but that is also tough to say exactly. Not a good sign regardless.

---

Mr-Movies,

With all due respect, the tell-tale is the empty drive, which means the bios chip is intact, but the file allocation isn't. It's just reading the raw drive spec. In 22 years of building computers, I've only see this a few times, and all the indications are that there is physical damage to the drive, more than likely caused by head contact with the platter. It would also explain why the drive vanishes after a few seconds of running. I suspect that a head has gone dead short and caused the burns dead shorting to the platter. It would also explain the power draw from the drive and the burning on the controller board. Even if the controller chip burned out, it wouldn't burn the board where the burn occurred. Generally there's just a small puff of smoke and the chip dies, without any further damage. The fact that the drive runs and identifies itself tells me it's not the controller because when the chip does burn out they are always totally dead, and don't even spin up, because it needs the chip to tell it to spin up and then un-park the heads. That plus the chip itself could never draw enough power to cause the Damage that Oman7 showed me earlier.

Respectfully,
Russ

---

Actually not, in 30+ years in the industry if there was a head crash you would still read some drive space typically unless all heads were dead, highly unlikely. The fact that it works then doesn't totally points to the controller. Sorry but I disagree with you and the platter numbers especially, even a single platter drive has multiple heads not all crash at once typically. You don't always have a small puff of smoke when a PCB goes down, they can fade, work and then not being very intermittent and very difficult to trouble shoot some times. There are many things that can go wrong, microchips, caps, diodes, and even resistors amongst other stuff.

It is true though that if the drive motor goes out that you would see this problem too. That is to easy to derive though as the drive would obviuosly not be spinning, no gyro effect or spindle noise.

Sorry Russ,
Steve

---