Broken hardware?
It has not been a good few weeks for delivering images.
First there's been the debacle with the CD writer. I shipped one CD of wedding photos, unknowing that not all the images could be read. Further testing has shown some discs to be damaged after writing. The jury is a little out on whether the problem is the blank discs or the writer, but I do know the writer, which also doubles as a DVD drive/writer, won't play 99% of movie discs 99% of the time.
However, although this might suggest the writer is at fault, I have another problem that confuses the issue. For a week now I've been unable to upload image galleries to my website without frequent but random timeouts. This comes at a time when the webhost is being reconfigured, so I blamed that initially, but new testing suggests the problem may be with the network adapter on the computer. Tonight I had a better indication that maybe the problems aren't just random timeouts. Thus:
My machine -> Cable modem -> Internet = Typical upload speed 12-18K/s
My machine -> Laptop via wifi -> Cable modem -> Internet = Typical upload speed 48-60K/s
That's a 3-4x speed increase after introducing an extra step. That can't be right. And there was me blaming Virgin Media for the poor Internet speed of late.
I'm reaching the conclusion that maybe the exploding power supply did actually damage some other components, which by some miracle are still kind of doing the right thing. Unfortunately my only way to confirm this is to swap out the motherboard, which is a pain.
The slightly scary part is that I have the Very Important Harddisks hanging off this same motherboard...
First there's been the debacle with the CD writer. I shipped one CD of wedding photos, unknowing that not all the images could be read. Further testing has shown some discs to be damaged after writing. The jury is a little out on whether the problem is the blank discs or the writer, but I do know the writer, which also doubles as a DVD drive/writer, won't play 99% of movie discs 99% of the time.
However, although this might suggest the writer is at fault, I have another problem that confuses the issue. For a week now I've been unable to upload image galleries to my website without frequent but random timeouts. This comes at a time when the webhost is being reconfigured, so I blamed that initially, but new testing suggests the problem may be with the network adapter on the computer. Tonight I had a better indication that maybe the problems aren't just random timeouts. Thus:
My machine -> Cable modem -> Internet = Typical upload speed 12-18K/s
My machine -> Laptop via wifi -> Cable modem -> Internet = Typical upload speed 48-60K/s
That's a 3-4x speed increase after introducing an extra step. That can't be right. And there was me blaming Virgin Media for the poor Internet speed of late.
I'm reaching the conclusion that maybe the exploding power supply did actually damage some other components, which by some miracle are still kind of doing the right thing. Unfortunately my only way to confirm this is to swap out the motherboard, which is a pain.
The slightly scary part is that I have the Very Important Harddisks hanging off this same motherboard...