Holothurian

MX-510 and Xtrac Pro HS. Waiting for those DFI Maxtill tempered glass pads

Put me down for at least one, maybe two.

Actually, I used the drone of my rig's fans to put my son to sleep when he was 2-3 weeks old. Anytime he woke up in the middle of the night and wouldn't go back to sleep I would take him downstairs, fire up my PC and just sit with him for 10-15 minutes while he calmed down and went back to sleep. Worked like a charm!

I’ve read a bunch in various “this mouse is the best” forums but nobody really talks about the mouse surface they use. I don’t know the exact surface that I use but I can say without question that my first gen optical mouse works MUCH better on my new mouse pad than my old one. My old mouse pad was one designed for a ball mouse and when I switched to a cheap optical mouse I found it jumping all over the place. Some people suggested the problems I was having was due to the color of my old pad (red) and said I should get a different color, either green or blue. The new mouse pad I use (black) seems to correct the jumping. It has a series of stacked cubes (anyone remember Q*bert?) printed on the smooth top layer of the pad that seems to stop the jumping of my optical mouse. I’ve seen products that have a hex grid printed on the pad plus a random series of dots in each hex that are said to improve optical tracking, but I can’t help but wonder if it is a gimmick or if simply the new gen of optical mice are better. Opinions?

How did Holothurian get his name: Many years ago my wife, some friends and me were playing Trivial Pursuit. About half way through the game I got bored and started making up the questions when it way my turn to read the cards. (“What is the distance between San Francisco and LA in nautical miles?” “In 1938 the Vice President of the United States was in a now famous 3-way car accident. What was the nick-name of the dog involved?” etc. Try it sometime, at your own risk!) When it came time to read my wife’s question I asked, “What is the scientific name of the common sea cucumber?” Well, I had forgotten that she has seen the same National Geographic special as me, so after a few minutes she gleefully came up with the correct answer “Nudibrac!” I was busted. I had to own up to making up all the questions, lost all my pie pieces, and she was really pissed! A few days later I was signing up for my very first internet account and was having a really hard time coming up with a logon that wasn’t already used, and I didn’t want to be something numerical like bob1453 or warf124, I wanted my own unique ID. After about 20 minutes of trying to think up a “cool” ID, my wife wandered past the den door and asked what I was doing. I explained my dilemma and she retorted, “Well, you could always be nudibrac!” and stormed off. So I tried nudibrac and it was already taken (I could have been nudibrac8, but, well, you know). I tried sea cucumber, but same thing. So I whipped out the dictionary and started looking at other related terms for nudibrac. I soon found “holothurian”, entered it as my login and it went though! That account is long gone but I’ve been Holothurian ever since. hol·o·thu·ri·an: Any of various echinoderms of the class Holothuroidea, which includes the sea cucumbers. From Latin holoth ria, water polyp, from Greek holothourion.

Got my ROM back today! Installed it, cleared my CMOS, rebooted and Presto!, my machine sprange to life again! No fuss, no muss! Thanks again to A_G and Randy!! Color this thread "Resolved"!!

Will do. Thanks!

Sorry for the length of this post, I'm just trying to give a history of the problem. I just finished building a new rig using the LanParty PRO875B Rev. B (XP Pro, 3.2 GHz w/HT). I finished installing all the hardware last week and had started playing with some of the apps that ship with the MB, one of which was RadarSync. It found a BIOS update for the board, so I downloaded it and was planning to flash later via DOS, but to my horror it went ahead and attempted to install it in Windows. (I knew I should have clicked "cancel" rather than "continue"!) Now when it boots I get a deep "Duh-dooo" beep and the following error: AWARD BootBlock BIOS v1.0 Copyright © 2000, Award Software, Inc. BIOS ROM Checksum error Detecting floppy drive A media... INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER I figured that since it was at least looking for the A: drive that all was not lost, so I made myself a bootable floppy on my other system, went to the DFI site and downloaded the LPPRO875B0409.ZIP (which I'm pretty sure shipped with my board since I don't remember seeing a full screen logo) and tried to flash. Here's where the fun really starts. Attempt 1: Booted from floppy, launched AWDFLASH (v8.30) but wasn't able to enter the BIOS .bin name. The cursor was way down under the file name box and couldn't be moved. Attempt 2: Downloaded 875LD409.BIN. Same result. Attempt 3: Downloaded 875LD212.BIN. Same result. Attempt 4. Created autoexec.bat with the line A:> awdflash.exe *.bin (* = BIOS filename) /F per the DFI site. Same result. Attempt 5. Downloaded different version of AWDFLASH (v8.23E). Now the .bin file name appears in the file name box and there is some floppy disk activity, but that's it. The program doesn't seem to finish, it just sits there with the floppy drive light on the whole time. Also, now when I reset the machine to try again, the system boots for about 5-6 seconds, then shuts of for 2-3 seconds, then reboots and gives the "Duh-dooo" beep and I'm back to square one. Attempts 6 - ? Tried different combos of the switches, /f /py /sn /cd /cp /cc /r etc, with both v8.23E and v8.30 but same result as #4. Tried clearing CMOS via both jumper and insert/ reset between awdflash “hang” and reboot. Tried removing CMOS battery. Tried unplugging for 30 min without battery and jumpered. Tried yelling and threatened it with a hammer (well, I tried that first before anything else ;D). So now I'm stuck. I'm looking for a yet a different version of awdflash since the other version fixed the cursor problem maybe a newer version will fix the "hang" problem. I know there are some switches that will erase the bootblock and other stuff, but I don't want to try that yet since I can get to the bootblock and find the a: drive. Thanks for any suggestions and help!