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Jim Sachs · 11-24-2003, 12:20 PM

Icarus -

Yes, welcome to the Forum. Sorry I didn't notice your post, but I've been busy settling back into a normal life after the fires, building a new machine, and fighting strep throat.

Yellow Tang is right - I no longer have any connection with Defender of the Crown or the game industry.

fishbowl · 11-25-2003, 01:07 AM

Originally posted by Jim Sachs
I've been busy ..... building a new machine

Jim, could you give us any details/specs of this new PC you are building?

Originally posted by Jim Sachs
..... and fighting strep throat.

Jim, I hope you get well soon and hopefully you don't run a fever. I had a bad case of strep throat a few years back and I can honestly tell you it was one of the worst 48 hours of my life.

Btw... Icarus ^i^, Welcome To The Forum!

Marian Nichols · 11-25-2003, 05:47 AM

Sorry to hear you've been sick, Jim. Saty in bed, drink plenty of liquids, take two asprins and call me in the morning,

Seriously, hope you are better, yes please tell us about your new machine!

Jim Sachs · 11-25-2003, 11:23 AM

Fishbowl - Just got the new machine up and running last night. Now I'm installing the hundreds of programs it takes to do the Aquarium development. How I long for the days when you could simply copy the programs onto the new hard drive and they'd just work. Now everything has to be "installed", with new license keys, etc.

Specs:
ASUS A7N8X motherboard (per Morgan's recommendation)
AMD 2200 Processor
1 Gig of RAM
120 Gig Hard Drive
G-Force FX 5200 Ultra

As far as the strep throat goes, I'm on penicillin (yes, they still use it after 50 years), and feeling better.

drfish · 11-25-2003, 11:47 AM

The A7N8X is a great board, I don't have one myself, but I've built 3 systems that use them. Did you get the deluxe version with SATA? (sorry, I just have to say this) If you did, I'd consider getting a pair of the new 72gig Western Digital Raptor drives when they come out (soon) and running them in RAID 1... They're insanely fast, quiet, run cool, and have a 5 year warranty because they're enterprise drives. The only thing you'd have to worry about if you ran them in RAID 1 would be off site backups...

Ok, that's it, no more comments on your new machine... Nope, I won't ask if you got 2 sticks of 512 so you could run dual channel with your memory, or why you went with a 2200 when a 2500 only costs a tiny amount more and has twice as much L2 cache, or why you got a FX 5200 and not an ATI card? Ahh! Sorry, stopping now... Forgive me please?

feldon34 · 11-25-2003, 12:03 PM

Once you get all your programs and everything set up, maybe you want to use Norton Ghost or DriveImage or something like that to take a snapshot and copy it to another hard drive?

Hard drives are so cheap now, I'd just keep one in a drawer with my programs on it.

cjmaddy · 11-25-2003, 12:51 PM

DriveImage or something like that to take a snapshot and copy it to another hard drive?

Just what I do!

midranger4 · 11-25-2003, 08:41 PM

Originally posted by feldon27
Once you get all your programs and everything set up, maybe you want to use Norton Ghost or DriveImage or something like that to take a snapshot and copy it to another hard drive?

Hard drives are so cheap now, I'd just keep one in a drawer with my programs on it.

I agree fully Feldon and would offer the following from a post in a technical forum I frequent.

The solution offered is one I thought about from many perspectives before choosing it over a RAID protected system.

My primary concern is HD failure and can surely relate to Jim's plight as it pertains to reloading third party software, entering license keys, and bringing these apps back up to current revs. A format/reload is good for a user that doesn't *live* on their PC. In my case so much critical data and programs reside on my system I went with the solution described below.

I hope my perspective offers some direction for some folks. I would simply encourage everyone to implement ANY type of solution because flying without a net is surely a risky proposition.

Jim, I hope your back where you need to be in quick fashion.

There are a number of ways to approach disaster recovery and it surely depends on your individual situation.

I went with a software based solution that combines Norton Ghost (http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/) with Second Copy (http://www.centered.com/) and I’m quite happy with the functionality and level of protection I enjoy. Basically Ghost creates an image of my primary hard drive to image files only it can read. These image files are created on my second hard drive. Should my primary hard drive fail I can use Ghost to restore the image off the second drive to a newly installed primary drive and have the system restored to the exact state it was in when the image was created. Problem with this approach however is you can’t be creating image files every hour because they take about 45 minutes to create (in my case) so I was still at risk of losing data that was changing between the times I created an image file (which I do about once a month).

This is where second copy comes in and this is likely my most cherished little utility. This gem of a program monitors folders I define for ANY changes and shoots a copy of the changed object over to the second hard drive. Now because my second hard drive is not a RAID drive I can use it not only for my Ghost images but for backup copies of changing data from the primary drive. So if my primary hard drive craps out I restore the Ghost image to a new drive then copy the backup folders second copy maintains on the secondary drive back to the primary and viola I’m back in the saddle.

Another major plus to second copy is 3 copies of monitored objects are available at any given time. The live version, the second copy version, and a third version in the recycle bin that is created every time the second copy version is overwritten. This provides pilot protection because I would have to save a bad file TWICE before I would not be able to recover it within seconds.

feldon34 · 11-26-2003, 12:36 AM

My main suggestion is to completely sever the link between data and applications. If you use Outlook, redirect it to write your Outlook "Store" files on one of your data drives.

Do everything you can to have data saved on a different hard drive from the OS.

In Jim's situation, I would network the main PC to another PC in the closet with a big hard drive that performs an automated backup every night.

cjmaddy · 11-29-2003, 01:18 PM

Jim,
I have to admit that as soon as I saw the specs for your new machine I immediately checked out the G-Force FX 5200 Ultra. ...... My reasoning was, - 'If it's good enough for Jim Sachs, then it's got to be good enough for me!'

The recommended minimum system suggested, made me think my setup may be inadequate, but the cost was much lower than I had expected, and I had a present due! - So I ordered it, - it came today.
With the 52.16 drivers, the sharpness and clarity is stunning! I didn't expect the difference between my GeForce4 MX440 to be too obvious, - but it is! ........ Thanks for 'dangling the carrot!' - it's wonderful!

kona001 · 11-30-2003, 11:42 PM

Yeah, 5200 Ultra is a great card. I still have my Geforce4 ti4400 which still runs the aquariums great. One thing it doesn't have is full support for DirectX 9 which the 5200 Ultra has. My next card will probably be two years from now, about the time I get a new PC. Hopefully by then they have 6Ghz Pc's on the market so a 3ghz would be the cheapest you can get.

Quick Death · 12-11-2003, 03:36 PM

Hey there Jim --

Have you gotten your computer up to snuff? Are you back to the Freshwater Aquarium? Are we still at 3 fish? Just 4 more . . . .we are so close . . . .how about an update, how are you doing status/post the fire, computer crash, illness . . . .

Jim Sachs · 12-11-2003, 07:22 PM

I do have the new computer working well enough to write/compile the Aquarium, though there are still a lot of things I have to install on it.

Yesterday I got the Cardinal Tetras working properly - since switching the program base over to DX8, the inner green band had been poking through to the outside when the fish turned.

EVERYTHING is different in DX8. For instance, all the sub-objects in the models must be listed in reverse order from DX6, and the Texture maps must be rightside-up instead of upside-down.

Quick Death · 12-11-2003, 07:29 PM

oh well, sounds like much more time . . . . guess the crowd will have to wait, 6months *pray*.

Thanks for the update!

memilm · 12-12-2003, 05:02 AM

very good news, thx Jim.

IXNAY · 12-13-2003, 09:46 AM

good to hear

Matthew · 12-18-2003, 01:00 PM

hi,

i'm new here. personally, I can't wait till i get the freshwater aquarium, cause the marine one looks stunning, However something passed my mind which is to make the ability to add 3d fish yourself, so the community can create fish themsleves. can this be done in any way?

anyway keep it up guys, i'm sure this screensaver will be stunning

ESHIREY · 12-18-2003, 02:37 PM

Originally posted by Matthew
hi,

i'm new here. personally, I can't wait till i get the freshwater aquarium, cause the marine one looks stunning, However something passed my mind which is to make the ability to add 3d fish yourself, so the community can create fish themsleves. can this be done in any way?

anyway keep it up guys, i'm sure this screensaver will be stunning

First off , Welcome to the forums , you will love it here . But to your question , this has been talked about before and the answer is no . Sorry .

Lostboy · 01-21-2004, 01:05 AM

This is Biskit

Panthera · 01-21-2004, 01:20 AM

Awwwwwww look at that PAWWW!

11-24-2003, 12:20 PM	#321
Jim Sachs Developer Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Southern Oregon Posts: 9,774	Icarus - Yes, welcome to the Forum. Sorry I didn't notice your post, but I've been busy settling back into a normal life after the fires, building a new machine, and fighting strep throat. Yellow Tang is right - I no longer have any connection with Defender of the Crown or the game industry. Jim Sachs Creator of SereneScreen Aquarium

11-25-2003, 05:47 AM	#323
Marian Nichols ~Author~ Join Date: Apr 2003 Location: Rocky Mount, NC Posts: 7,429	Sorry to hear you've been sick, Jim. Saty in bed, drink plenty of liquids, take two asprins and call me in the morning, Seriously, hope you are better, yes please tell us about your new machine! Write paranormal mysteries. Six books so far.

11-25-2003, 11:23 AM	#324
Jim Sachs Developer Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Southern Oregon Posts: 9,774	Fishbowl - Just got the new machine up and running last night. Now I'm installing the hundreds of programs it takes to do the Aquarium development. How I long for the days when you could simply copy the programs onto the new hard drive and they'd just work. Now everything has to be "installed", with new license keys, etc. Specs: ASUS A7N8X motherboard (per Morgan's recommendation) AMD 2200 Processor 1 Gig of RAM 120 Gig Hard Drive G-Force FX 5200 Ultra As far as the strep throat goes, I'm on penicillin (yes, they still use it after 50 years), and feeling better. Jim Sachs Creator of SereneScreen Aquarium

11-25-2003, 11:47 AM	#325
drfish the Doc Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Zeeland, MI Posts: 5,353	The A7N8X is a great board, I don't have one myself, but I've built 3 systems that use them. Did you get the deluxe version with SATA? (sorry, I just have to say this) If you did, I'd consider getting a pair of the new 72gig Western Digital Raptor drives when they come out (soon) and running them in RAID 1... They're insanely fast, quiet, run cool, and have a 5 year warranty because they're enterprise drives. The only thing you'd have to worry about if you ran them in RAID 1 would be off site backups... Ok, that's it, no more comments on your new machine... Nope, I won't ask if you got 2 sticks of 512 so you could run dual channel with your memory, or why you went with a 2200 when a 2500 only costs a tiny amount more and has twice as much L2 cache, or why you got a FX 5200 and not an ATI card? Ahh! Sorry, stopping now... Forgive me please? I don't watch commercials.

11-25-2003, 12:03 PM	#326
feldon34 Forum Administrator Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Rock Hill, SC Posts: 10,938	Once you get all your programs and everything set up, maybe you want to use Norton Ghost or DriveImage or something like that to take a snapshot and copy it to another hard drive? Hard drives are so cheap now, I'd just keep one in a drawer with my programs on it. "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." - George Orwell "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman

11-25-2003, 01:07 AM	#322
fishbowl Cramped Quarters Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: People's Republik of Kalifornia Posts: 223	Originally posted by Jim Sachs I've been busy ..... building a new machine Jim, could you give us any details/specs of this new PC you are building? Originally posted by Jim Sachs ..... and fighting strep throat. Jim, I hope you get well soon and hopefully you don't run a fever. I had a bad case of strep throat a few years back and I can honestly tell you it was one of the worst 48 hours of my life. Btw... Icarus ^i^, Welcome To The Forum!

11-25-2003, 12:51 PM	#327
cjmaddy Registered Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: Lancashire, UK Posts: 7,854	DriveImage or something like that to take a snapshot and copy it to another hard drive? Just what I do!

11-25-2003, 08:41 PM	#328
midranger4 Registered Join Date: Nov 2003 Posts: 53	Originally posted by feldon27 Once you get all your programs and everything set up, maybe you want to use Norton Ghost or DriveImage or something like that to take a snapshot and copy it to another hard drive? Hard drives are so cheap now, I'd just keep one in a drawer with my programs on it. I agree fully Feldon and would offer the following from a post in a technical forum I frequent. The solution offered is one I thought about from many perspectives before choosing it over a RAID protected system. My primary concern is HD failure and can surely relate to Jim's plight as it pertains to reloading third party software, entering license keys, and bringing these apps back up to current revs. A format/reload is good for a user that doesn't live on their PC. In my case so much critical data and programs reside on my system I went with the solution described below. I hope my perspective offers some direction for some folks. I would simply encourage everyone to implement ANY type of solution because flying without a net is surely a risky proposition. Jim, I hope your back where you need to be in quick fashion. There are a number of ways to approach disaster recovery and it surely depends on your individual situation. I went with a software based solution that combines Norton Ghost (http://www.symantec.com/sabu/ghost/ghost_personal/) with Second Copy (http://www.centered.com/) and I’m quite happy with the functionality and level of protection I enjoy. Basically Ghost creates an image of my primary hard drive to image files only it can read. These image files are created on my second hard drive. Should my primary hard drive fail I can use Ghost to restore the image off the second drive to a newly installed primary drive and have the system restored to the exact state it was in when the image was created. Problem with this approach however is you can’t be creating image files every hour because they take about 45 minutes to create (in my case) so I was still at risk of losing data that was changing between the times I created an image file (which I do about once a month). This is where second copy comes in and this is likely my most cherished little utility. This gem of a program monitors folders I define for ANY changes and shoots a copy of the changed object over to the second hard drive. Now because my second hard drive is not a RAID drive I can use it not only for my Ghost images but for backup copies of changing data from the primary drive. So if my primary hard drive craps out I restore the Ghost image to a new drive then copy the backup folders second copy maintains on the secondary drive back to the primary and viola I’m back in the saddle. Another major plus to second copy is 3 copies of monitored objects are available at any given time. The live version, the second copy version, and a third version in the recycle bin that is created every time the second copy version is overwritten. This provides pilot protection because I would have to save a bad file TWICE before I would not be able to recover it within seconds.

11-26-2003, 12:36 AM	#329
feldon34 Forum Administrator Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Rock Hill, SC Posts: 10,938	My main suggestion is to completely sever the link between data and applications. If you use Outlook, redirect it to write your Outlook "Store" files on one of your data drives. Do everything you can to have data saved on a different hard drive from the OS. In Jim's situation, I would network the main PC to another PC in the closet with a big hard drive that performs an automated backup every night. "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." - George Orwell "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman

11-29-2003, 01:18 PM	#330
cjmaddy Registered Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: Lancashire, UK Posts: 7,854	Jim, I have to admit that as soon as I saw the specs for your new machine I immediately checked out the G-Force FX 5200 Ultra. ...... My reasoning was, - 'If it's good enough for Jim Sachs, then it's got to be good enough for me!' The recommended minimum system suggested, made me think my setup may be inadequate, but the cost was much lower than I had expected, and I had a present due! - So I ordered it, - it came today. With the 52.16 drivers, the sharpness and clarity is stunning! I didn't expect the difference between my GeForce4 MX440 to be too obvious, - but it is! ........ Thanks for 'dangling the carrot!' - it's wonderful!

11-30-2003, 11:42 PM	#331
kona001 New Husband and new Aquarium Join Date: Nov 2002 Location: Miami, Florida Posts: 318	Yeah, 5200 Ultra is a great card. I still have my Geforce4 ti4400 which still runs the aquariums great. One thing it doesn't have is full support for DirectX 9 which the 5200 Ultra has. My next card will probably be two years from now, about the time I get a new PC. Hopefully by then they have 6Ghz Pc's on the market so a 3ghz would be the cheapest you can get.

12-11-2003, 03:36 PM	#332
Quick Death Registered Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: New York Posts: 102	Hey there Jim -- Have you gotten your computer up to snuff? Are you back to the Freshwater Aquarium? Are we still at 3 fish? Just 4 more . . . .we are so close . . . .how about an update, how are you doing status/post the fire, computer crash, illness . . . .

12-11-2003, 07:22 PM	#333
Jim Sachs Developer Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Southern Oregon Posts: 9,774	I do have the new computer working well enough to write/compile the Aquarium, though there are still a lot of things I have to install on it. Yesterday I got the Cardinal Tetras working properly - since switching the program base over to DX8, the inner green band had been poking through to the outside when the fish turned. EVERYTHING is different in DX8. For instance, all the sub-objects in the models must be listed in reverse order from DX6, and the Texture maps must be rightside-up instead of upside-down. Jim Sachs Creator of SereneScreen Aquarium

12-11-2003, 07:29 PM	#334
Quick Death Registered Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: New York Posts: 102	oh well, sounds like much more time . . . . guess the crowd will have to wait, 6months pray. Thanks for the update!

12-12-2003, 05:02 AM	#335
memilm Registered Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: germany Posts: 259	very good news, thx Jim.

12-13-2003, 09:46 AM	#336
IXNAY Green Frog Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Germany Posts: 840	good to hear IXNAY dreaming of the serene terrarium - My Private Homepage -

12-18-2003, 01:00 PM	#337
Matthew Registered Join Date: Dec 2003 Location: Malta, Europe Posts: 1	hi, i'm new here. personally, I can't wait till i get the freshwater aquarium, cause the marine one looks stunning, However something passed my mind which is to make the ability to add 3d fish yourself, so the community can create fish themsleves. can this be done in any way? anyway keep it up guys, i'm sure this screensaver will be stunning

12-18-2003, 02:37 PM	#338
ESHIREY Smilie Dragon Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: Lebanon, PA Posts: 4,725	Originally posted by Matthew hi, i'm new here. personally, I can't wait till i get the freshwater aquarium, cause the marine one looks stunning, However something passed my mind which is to make the ability to add 3d fish yourself, so the community can create fish themsleves. can this be done in any way? anyway keep it up guys, i'm sure this screensaver will be stunning First off , Welcome to the forums , you will love it here . But to your question , this has been talked about before and the answer is no . Sorry . Thank you for taking the time to read this.