How do you use ir/man, shutdown controller with book PC??

Cue · 06-13-2000, 01:21 PM

I was thinking about getting a book PC for my mp3 player but they dont have any serial ports on them do they? How could I use the ir man and the shutdown controller? could i get a serial to usb adapter or something?

[This message has been edited by Cue (edited 06-13-2000).]

cenwesi · 06-13-2000, 01:52 PM

Get one of those USB->Serial thing....they cost somewhere around $54.00. It might be cheaper now. And people, YOU DON'T NEED TO WORRY ABOUT NOT SHUTTING DOWN WIN9x properlly. Turn off scandisk!!!!

abcd-1

Cue · 06-13-2000, 10:38 PM

If you turn off scandisk it will eventually ruin the hard drive though.

Callahan · 06-13-2000, 10:48 PM

Eventually ruin the hard drive? How exactly is this going to happen? I've been running my system for a year and I turn it off by pulling the inverter out of the socket.. no problems yet, I've ran scandisk a couple times just to check and no problems ever came up.. I don't even have any real shock protection for my hard drive.. maybe I'm just lucky tho.

Cue · 06-14-2000, 01:02 AM

Also it would be a pain like when I get gas or just turn off the car for a few minutes,and then have to wait for the pc to boot up again. Is there anybody using the IR man with a book PC? and is there anyone that has some sort of timed comtroller that can be used with it? As for the scandisk thing and ruining the hard drive, you will get bad sectors in the drive by turning it off all the time, when my desktop gets power cut to it and scandisk runs, it says it found errors on the drive and repaired them all.

Rob Withey · 06-14-2000, 02:34 AM

You get errors on the drive when you are writing to the disk, and the disk cache hasn't had a chance to empty properly.
I've been running DOS and always just turn off the power. Since I'm never writing to the disk, and don't run any sort of disk cacheing, I've never had a problem with scandisk - I manually run it from time to time.

I don't think you can physically damage your drive by taking it's power away. Drives these days are auto parking. I used to have one ages ago that wasn't, but that was a WD hard-card in my 8086 machine.

Rob

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Callahan · 06-14-2000, 12:14 PM

An error on a drive is not always a 'bad sector'.. most of the time the the errors are just in the file allocation tables, not physical parts.. In any drives that I have had that had bad sectors, these sectors were unrecoverable, and usually due to a sharp drop or something causing damage to the platter itself.

You won't cause physical damage by just turning it off just as said in a previous post (I remember having to run the park utility on really old HDs.. ugh)..

Like I said, I have run my mp3 player in the car for a year and its always just shut down by pulling the plug.. no problems. *shrug*

fjmedinaa · 06-14-2000, 02:06 PM

I recall some spec. in my drive that read something like "number of power cycles", does that have something to do with turning it on/off?
Is my disk closing to its death every time I pull the plug?

or what the heck does it mean?

Rob Withey · 06-14-2000, 05:24 PM

But on the other hand, if you leave it running you'll get bitten by the MTBF (mean time between failures).

Face up to it, it's mechanical, it wears out eventually...!

Rob

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sproggy · 06-14-2000, 06:26 PM

You could always buy 100 64Mb flash memory cards and not worry about such problems

Except maybe your bank balance may hurt

Sproggy http://www.sproggy.com