Site News May 31, 2012

The state of the stream

Last night after Shoot the Noise we noticed the broadcast and recording system having some issues. The system had roughly 4 months of continuous streaming, not bad for an XP box. So I decided to give it a reboot and let the updates run. Apparently this was a *bad idea* as windows update crashed out, taking with it a few other programs. I saw Skype crash out and assumed that’s all it was. When the box took more than half an hour to come back up I knew there was a problem. The hard disk had developed some bad blocks, killing some apparently important dll files (and one never used sound effect).

I’m currently working on recovering the system, as it’s only a few bad blocks on a 9 year old hard disk I think we can get it going again. Thing is, with as many dlls missing I’m not sure that a rebuild is unavoidable. That last sentence may be a double negative and confusing for some listeners, so to clarify: I may have to re install XP on the computer we use to stream and record.

Good news is I have been meaning to replace that computer with a better one, and have the replacement on hand. It’s not setup (at all), so if I have to do a re build anyway I’ll swap over to the better hardware. What all this means is that if I can’t get the old broadcast computer up and going again when I get home from work then Pure Decking will be a miss so I can get the new system setup. I may grab a laptop and get something on the stream while I work on the replacement system, but be warned, it might be the 10 hour remix of the trollolol song.

Update: The hard disk is in worse shape that I originally thought, looks like I’m building a new broadcast box tonight. That means no new Pure Decking tonight, sorry.

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