Hardware Updates

I've been out of action for a few days, thanks to some testing that I was doing on the compute shader with 'customized' drivers. Basically I tried disabling the reset functionality for a hung driver, which typically triggers after 2 seconds of the driver not returning from an operation. This (unfortunately) seems to be common with some of the testing that I'm doing on current level hardware, so I wanted to see if there was something that I was doing or if the driver had a bug.

So anyways, I disabled the reset to allow the driver as much time as needed to complete my task, which was a form of image processing with the CS. The driver hung hard, and it took the display with it since it can't recover. Eventually I gave up and had to do a hard reset of the laptop, which started a series of events leading to a hard disk failure.

Ever since the hard crash, there were unusually long pauses when reading and writing to the hard disk, making my normal routines nearly impossible to do. The side part of this story is that I bought a new hard drive about 6 months ago, and got the cheapy Fujitsu instead of a better quality one. I think you know where this is heading - I should have bought a good disk from the start...

So now I have a 500 GB Seagate spinning away and installing all sorts of critical updates to Vista. Hopefully I'll have my development environment back up and running soon, and then I can get back to my D3D11 development work. Until then, take this mini-tip: don't buy the cheap stuff!