Skip to main content

Oh The Pain

I seem to be the poster child for failed hardware. Today, my Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-112D decided to stop writing discs. From what I can tell, though, this has been going on since the day I installed this disc drive.

Pioneer admitted in 2007, just prior to my purchase of the drive, that there are some manufacturing problems with the drive. They shipped the drive because they "did not feel that a use-case existed in which the error would manifest." Well, apparently that was wrong because many a person has experienced problems with these drives.

For the last year, I've noticed that my Windows XP 64-bit has been experiencing random halts that would last for about 5 seconds. During that time, I would grumble and refine my repertoire of colorful expletives.

Today, after installing a SONY DRU-842A as a replacement, I noticed the random halting was gone. The startup time for Windows was back to its super-fast normal self. With the Pioneer in there, sometimes the Windows boot would just pause for about 15 seconds, or longer, before the splash screen, and then resume. With the SONY, it was super-fast again.

Reviewing the Windows EventViewer, I see that the Pioneer cdrom reported "An error was detected on device \Device\CdRom0 during a paging operation." I suppose that would be the first indication that something was awry with the drive. In the EventViewer, though, that is only a warning. The real error that I saw recently was "The device, \Device\CdRom0, has a bad block." That error is a real indication of death for the Pioneer CD drive.

So far I've replaced my CDROM, my motherboard, and my video card. I have a 22 inch Hanns-G HG216 waiting for install as soon as I get some screws that properly seat it into my Neo-Flex bracket. What's next? I suppose there will be a hard drive failure soon, but that's expected, so I run RAID-5 with Western Digital hard drives and a 3Ware controller.

Popular posts from this blog

Number of Primes

Anderson's Theorem (a) The number of primes in [1,n] is no more than 2+floor(n/2). The probability of n being prime when n is not prime is 1/2 - see Dasgupta,Papadimitriou,Vazirani "Algorithms" page 26. Therefore, the E(pi(n)) is n/2. (b) There does not exist another set of adjacent primes other than {1,2,3} 5: 2 + floor(5/2) = 2 + 2 = 4:=> {1,2,3,5} : 4 <= 4 7: 2 + floor(7/2) = 2 + 3 = 5 => {1,2,3,5,7} : 5 <= 5 11: 2 + floor(11/2) = 2 + 5 = 7 => {1,2,3,5,7,11} 6 <= 7 26: 2 + floor(26/2) = 15 => {1,2,3,5,7,11,13,17,19,23} : 10 <= 15 Lagrange's Theorem is Inaccurate Lagrange's theorem about primes states that pi(x) is the number of primes <= x. The pi(x) is approximately x/ln(x). He postulated that the lim of pi(x)/(x/lnx) as x-> infinity was 1. This is incorrect. if the number of primes is bounded by n/2 then refactoring and reducing Lagrange's Theorem results in the lim of ln(x) as x approaches infinity. This is alwa...
Read more

How To Cancel ATT Uverse

I was a subscriber to the AT&T Uverse service for a little over 2 years. In that time, we had experienced good service for the first year, and then it sucked. After 12 months, or there in, the service degraded quickly, and would stop working all together at times. At first it would die for a short period of time, usually when we were not home. Then it would get progressively worst, until there was an entire week of no service. We had technicians at the house trying to fix the service, but it would repeat the behavior quite consistently. On January 15th we finally gave up and switched to a lesser service, COX TV and Internet. In the past we had cable service and it was always reliable, but not as good as the AT&T digital service. COX doesn't have nearly as many HD channels, but that's not enough. We needed internet to be reliable, and AT&T couldn't deliver that. Cancelling the AT&T service was a nightmare. Try to find anything about such things on their web s...
Read more

Stock Option Debt Income

The 2024 Presidential election has brought out a topic of interest that seems to have been perverted. There is this "Taxing Unrealized Capital Gains" [1] movement that is being falsely attributed to Vice President Harris. Clearly, this is a change in the revenue code that was designed by someone in office long before VP Harris was in office. My money is on Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. What is this change in the revenue code though? For that you have to understand what Silicon Valley zillionaires are doing with their stock options. Many of these people in this special economic area have huge discounts on stock prices for companies that are not public yet, or are public and can not be sold [2]. To be fair to these holders of equity, banks allow them to finance debt using leverage against those options. If you hold an option that is worth $5M then a bank might lend you a share of that value, thus realizing a debt against the option [3]. This is a fair debt instrument and...
Read more