Digitalchris Blog

For those gamers or hardware enthusiasts looking for a decent upgrade, MaximumPC has a pretty good overview of parts and technologies currently in the “sweet spot”.  This article is aimed at the PC upgrader, but is just as valid for the do-it-yourselfer building his own rig on a budget.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/highperformance_upgrades_cheap

Following on the heels of that, ExtremeTech has come out with an article for upgrading a gaming PC, with 6 different price points.

Choosing the right PSU is vitally important to the custom PC builder. Here is a great breakdown of tiered power supplies:

http://www.eggxpert.com/forums/thread/323050.aspx

Serverless NAT to NAT communication?  A clever solution:

http://samy.pl/pwnat/

I will have to test this one out in various environments and report back.

Ahh, another day, another Windows Update auto-update gone horribly wrong.

I woke up to this:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM

I tried to boot from my XP SP2 slipstream disk and go to a recovery console, but even there I could not get the file to copy or rename. Chkdsk tried but failed.

Here is how I got my system back up and running.

It wasn’t helping that my C: drive is a RAID 0 stripe across 2 disks; this made it pretty much impossible to drop the hard drive into another machine and fix it from there.

To fix the issue, I did the dreaded reinstall. However I installed to C:\WINDUHS instead of the default. This allowed me to get a semi-functional XP up and running. From there, I went to start, Run, REGEDIT.

In the registry editor, I highlighted HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, and then went to File -> Load Hive.

I located Windows\System32\Config\system and added it. REGEDIT asked for a name so I used “BADBADBAD”.

REGEDIT complained that there were errors in the hive, and that it had to repair it, but that it was successful. VOILA!

Next I unloaded the BADBADBAD hive by selecting it and choosing File… unload hive.

Now, when rebooting I had to choose the older boot option (which came up second… you can edit your boot.ini if you want to modify this), but I got my old system back! Not only that, but I have a handy WINDUHS install at the ready should anything cause my system to become unbootable in the future.

Reddit user morewaffles asked Reddit for suggestions on a “Game with Depth”; the suggestions that followed are a list of PC games for people who enjoy plot, replayability, and quality.

Check out the Reddit forum post.

How did I miss this site? Tineye.com will take your image or link and find out where it comes from, or at least where else it is on the internet.  This bears further testing!  Apparently still in beta.

Google has announced its own DNS resolver.  In typical Google fashion, it promises to be faster and more reliable than whatever DNS server NBC, err I mean Comcast is currently bogging you down with.

The scary part concerns the fact that now Google will ostensibly know not only everything you search for, but every IP your computer connects to regardless of search.  But hey, “don’t be evil” right?

Even the IPs are badass and easy to remember:

The Google Public DNS IP addresses are as follows:

• 8.8.8.8
• 8.8.4.4

MediaMonkey (http://www.mediamonkey.com/) is a much-heralded free (with paid gold version) program to help organize that ridiculously messy mp3 collection. It even acts as a player, and can reportedly sync your ipod/iphone without needing iTunes.

I will investigate further and report back with a full review!

Have you had positive or negative experiences with MediaMonkey? Let me know!