Static Zing

Well, I had a very bad day at the computers yesterday. Needless to say, things didn't go as smoothly as I had hoped in my attempt to upgrade the beast to successfully noticed hard drives bigger than 137gb. The ATA card I picked up from CompUSA didn't work as expected, I think because it is a RAID card and not just an ATA133 I/O card. All my tools (most especially BootIT NG were confused when I added a second hard drive to it. I put the new 200gb hard drive in my main machine, but unfortunately I don't have any free mounts for another hard drive, so I had to move one out. I moved out the 160gb Deskstar drive that had 2 big NTFS partitions from my days on WinXP.

After putting the CompUSA card in my beast, it worked pretty well with the 160gb hard drive that was in there. But I wasn't happy enough with that, so I tried to put the 160gb hard drive from the PC-BSD machine in it and that confused the daylights out of everything. BootIT NG and the tools found on the UBCD noticed the first 80gb hard drive fine (on the normal IDE controller), and one of the 160gb hard drives. But, while all the tools saw a third hard drive, they all showed it as the 80gb hard drive for some reason. Which is a drag. And just having it in there seemed to make BootIT NG get too confused to even work.

So I think I'm going to return the card and get a more narrowly defined, ATA133 PCI card, rather than one that can be a RAID card. That looks like it will work okay, as I have one in the main machine that I transferred over to test.

But that wasn't the worst of it. I've been having a real problem with static electricity. I've rebooted my PC-BSD machine a couple of times when I've gotten too close to the power button on the front of the case and felt a ZAP of static. And with all those big hard drives, it takes forever and a day to reboot PC-BSD, as it has to run fsck on all of them. Luckily, I haven't seemed to lose anything yet, but it is only a matter of time.

Then, this morning, I got a jolt when reaching behind my cheap-o 15in LCD monitor and, sure enough, I completely fried it. So all my hard work trying to get my dual monitor set up running was all for naught. But at least I get my 1280x1024 display back on my main monitor, which is a relief. So I ordered up a 17in LCD from CompUSA - an Envision EN7410e, which is only $130 after rebates, and it includes free shipping. It only has a 60hz refresh rate, but at least it goes to 1280x1024, so I can finally use 2560x1024 as my dual monitor desktop.

Here's a good tip from Microsoft, of all places, on how to minimize static electricity:

Static electricity can cause problems for your computer, ranging from unexplained crashes to permanent damage. If you have carpeting that is causing static electricity problems, you can purchase anti-static sprays designed specifically for this problem, but they can be expensive: $4 US or more for a 16-ounce spray bottle.

You can solve the problem for a lot less with a single trip to your local grocery store. Buy an empty spray bottle and a bottle of standard laundry fabric softener - pick one with a scent that you like. Then dilute the fabric softener with water at about a 1:10 ratio and put it in the spray bottle. Spray the carpet lightly, especially around computer work areas. This should reduce or eliminate the static build-up. Reapply as needed, though you should be able to go at least a week or two between applications.

So that's what I'm going to do. It should also hasten the office move downstairs, where there is a tiled floor.