Log 2016122501

The Robot is a piece of equipment that I use in my distance hiking volunteerism. And this log's title establishes the parameters of what can be posted here.  But the logistics of that (such as the motorhome, or hiking gear) are also apart of this.

The Robot's operating system needs to be freshly re-installed.  Diagnostics on the Windows Update functions failed today.  That's alright because it really doesn't take too much time to do that and there really isn't very much in way of software installed on it anyways.  I don't think that Windows is going to wipe every hard disk drive, but just in case, I'll dismount the 4th one's data cable as the operating system is reinstalling.  It contains documents, movies, music, videos, etc...

With the hard disks data cables being attached to an expansion SATA RAID card, I could all four hard disks to function as one and I believe that's called an "array."  It distributes the load of the software evenly amongst the hard disks.  But that would entail wiping the 4th hard disk.  So lately, I've been performing a manual array.  That means that I've been keeping track of what's to be, or is installed in the system and assigning each one to strategic locations.  For instance, Google Earth, Picasa, and GPSBabel are installed on three separate hard disks.  In the even that all 3 applications are running, they won't be using the same hard disk at the same time.  Each disk can do one thing and run as optimally as possible.  Switching to a true array is a possible future upgrade.

With all that being said, I have most of the applications and where they go already written down.  So there's no need to stop, think and scratch my head over what I have to install next.  At this rate, I can multi - task their installations and get it done much faster.

I believe I ran into trouble when I changed a key in the registry when I was altering the location of the user files (such as documents and videos). There were other problems, too.  One was my expansion Wi-Fi card.  It stopped being recognized by the operating system and nothing that I tried to do could do to affect it.  That's just one that I could remember.