Sure, this time I went through the
article! Again, I would have liked to
have some such and more if I ever teach
trigonometry again.

For the project: The work for the project
is as usual fast, fun, and easy but gets
delayed by random, external nonsense. But
have to expect such random stuff. Between
now and going live is all just routine.

The current random nonsense is my
development computer got sick: Apparently
there was a motherboard problem giving
serious data corruption.

I was working up orders for parts for two
new computers when the old computer
finally seriously quit.

So, I rushed out and just -- horrors --
actually BOUGHT a computer, not just parts
but an actual computer. I got an HP
laptop with Windows 10 Home Edition.

Then I ordered the parts. They have come
now and are ready to plug together.

I deliberately selected parts about one
generation out of date.

Why?

(1) My startup software makes some use,
actually light, of SQL Server; it insists
on ECC (error correcting coding) main
memory, and I like it, too.

Apparently ECC main memory needs all of
the memory, motherboard, and processor to
support ECC. Well, now the easy way to
get that is to buy some old parts.

(2) I'm happy using a computer with a good
BIOS but don't want to get involved in the
newer Unified Extensible Firmware
Interface (UEFI).

Why against UEFI? No visible upside for
me. Likely big downsides of lots of new
architecture I don't need, lots of new
complexity I don't want to have to work
with, maybe some new bugs, and no doubt
rather poor documentation, and less good
technical information on the Internet.

Computer Industry: If you don't work hard
to document your work, then I'll work hard
to avoid your work.

(3) Older parts tend to have fewer bugs
and better technical information.

For the case I got a

Thermaltake V3 VL80001W2Z (Black)

It's big, with a 120 mm fan and lots of
air holes and places for more fans.

For a motherboard, I considered the

Asus m5a97 R2.0

but gave up as apparently they are now out
of production and super hard to find in
stock.

So, I settled on the

Asus m5a78l-m-usb3

It's a cute little thing, micro-ATX, a
BIOS but no Unified Extensible Firmware
Interface (UEFI). It supports ECC (error
correcting coding) main memory and has an
AM3+ socket for the AMD FX series of
processors. I got two of the motherboards
from AVADirect in Cleveland.

For main memory the motherboard has four
DDR3 slots and can take a total of 32 GB.
I was able to find and got 4 DIMMs of
DDR3, 4 GB per DIMM, at 1333 MHz with ECC.

The processor is an AMD FX-8350, 64 bit
addressing, with 8 cores with a standard
clock of 4.0 GHz. Yes it can consume 125
W of power; thus, I will have maybe more
than one fan in the case.

For the needs of my startup, that
processor, motherboard, and main memory
will do a LOT of computing. E.g., my old
computer that died had a single core
processor at 1.8 GHz, and it had my Web
site pages showing on the screen before I
could get my finger off the Enter key. My
actual software timings indicate that this
new FX-8350 computer will have plenty of
capacity to do very nicely as a first
server.

For disks, I got two Western Digital
drives, SATA at 3.0 Gbps, and 500 GB each.

And I will bring over the SATA drives from
my old computer.

And I got lots of fans, cables, etc.

Long ago I got tired of wrestling with
file system drive letters. So, I have
some directories DATA01, DATA02, DATA03,
DATA05, PROG01, PROG02, PROG03, and they
have all MY data, and my software works
fine no matter what drive letters those
directories are on or larger trees they
are in. I will be using this little
approach again.

I have a thing, goal, I want:

In my past work with Windows for this
project, too often I had to reinstall
Windows and all my other software, and
those reinstalls, even with all the
practice I got, were a lot of work. So my
goal is to solve this problem of
reinstalling.

So, I want:

(1) More than one instance of a bootable
operating system.

(2) Each installed instance on its own
hard disk partition with little or nothing
else important on such a partition.

(3) In case a hard disk with a bootable
partition fails, bootable partitions on at
least two hard disks.

(4) Good backups of the bootable
partitions.

So, if something seems wrong with a
bootable partition, say, C:, then I will
boot another bootable partition, say, D:,
and restore C: from a backup.

I want the restore to be fast, easy, and
bit-perfect.

So, how to get such bootable partition
backups and do such restores? Well, maybe
Acronis True Image or the Western Digital
Data Lifeguard Tools will be sufficient --
I have fully legal copies of both. In the
past I had some really bad times with
Microsoft's NTBACKUP, but I'm willing to
try again.

But for Acronis, Lifeguard, NTBACKUP, I
accept I will have to run some
experiments. So, as soon as the computer
is running, I will do the experiments and
get saving and restoring a bootable
partition fast, easy, reliable, and well
documented.

Yes, apparently backup and restore of the
files for SQL Server requires some special
considerations.

So, backup/restore needs are for (A)
instances of installed operating systems,
(B) files used by SQL Server, and (C)
everything else, that is my data.

For (C) my long used solution is just
using Microsoft's XCOPY with some
carefully selected options and called from
one of several scripts I have in Rexx. I
have some scripts for full backup of a
file system directory sub-tree and also
incremental backups.

For the experiments in backup and restore
of bootable partitions, I may just use my
old legal copy, that before the
experiments are over, I will have to
reinstall several times, of Windows XP SP2
Professional.

When I get those experiments done I will
install a legal copy I have of Windows 7
64 bit Professional, on bootable
partitions on at least two bootable
drives, get the updates, and backup up the
partitions.

Then I will do software installations and
do backups again.

Next get SQL Server running again.

Then try to get my old SQL Server data
base working again.

My experience doing such things in the
past has me suspect that before I get this
far I will have to make use of the results
of my experiments in restoring bootable
partitions.

Then install the .NET Framework and get my
startup software running again.

That will be a good day!

I have a few tweaks in mind for the
software.

For the code for the crucial core applied
math, I want to check that a third time.
The last time I checked that code, I got
out a lot of trace data, programmed the
calculations again independently, and
confirmed that on the trace data both
codes gave the same results. I want to do
that again.

Then I will do some more data collection.

Then I will give a critical review and
consider revisions.

Then comes alpha test, beta test, going
live, ....

In short, between now and then, it's all
just routine work.