[lug] Superblock in the future?

[Marty Haught]

> Do you know if the monitor works on the DVI of any other video card? I'm
> just wondering if you can guarantee that the monitor DVI port is
> functioning correctly.

I just tried it out on my home PC (which runs XP) and it worked fine. 
I did notice that I had to switch the mode on the monitor (it has 5
modes apparently) so changing it to #2 DVI-D made it work. D-Sub was
#1 and what I used for the VGA connection.  I didn't realize this
earlier so it may actually work on my laptop (I'll try this in the
morning as I'm signing off shortly).


> One thing that comes to mind is a brown-out/low voltage, which is far
> worse than just losing power. During a low voltage bits can be randomly
> flipped without any real way of knowing its happening. If the monitor
> were malfunctioning (or the DVI port of the vid card) I could see the
> possibility of the system power getting a dose of low voltage.
>
> I'm also reminded of some talk a few years back concerning power saver
> modes in laptops, where it would change clocking to save energy...if
> other parts of the system didn't know it was doing it, strange things
> could happen. Does your bios have a setting you could test which forces
> it to not use power saver modes?

I believe so.  The bios must be a special one for the Dell XPS laptops
as it has a lot of options and power saving is one of them.  Also
video expansion was another but I didn't know what to make of that
one.


> FYI, no matter what the cause, I'd want to know if I could boot off of
> knoppix and at least read the partition and safely explore.

I don't have a knoppix CD but I probably should (can you tell I'm not
that skilled with Linux?;)).  I'll burn an image tomorrow of it.  I
also have realized that it's been a while since I backed up my data
(though all my important code is in subversion at my company's
datacenter).  That's another thing to do tomorrow.  Thanks for the
help.

Cheers,
Marty