I have an A70-210 f/4 around here (somewhere) that I was thinking of selling. As far as I'm aware it's optically fine, but the zoom is very free so it will slide if you point the lens straight up/down. It certainly takes sharper pics at the long end than my 80-320 can manage at a similar length and aperture. However, I find manual focus without a split ring focus screen a challenge (glasses probably don't help), so it gets very little use.

Robin

I've put the above items on ebay, so if anyone is interested here are the links...

Cable Switch F

MZ10 Body (yeah, I know, I'll be lucky...)

FA 28-80

I also have a eyepiece diopter adjustment lens (type M?) strength -2 that is surplus to requirements if anyone is interested for a few quid.

cheers,

Robin

On the other hand, they've (or someone has) managed to get the K100D listed in the latest Argos catalogue. Not, perhaps, everyone's idea of a great place to buy a camera, but a sign of mass market appeal/uptake. Previously I've only ever seen the Canon/Nikon entry level SLRs in there.

Not sure how many sales they'll make - anyone reading the small print might be put off by the fact that it's shown as weighing 795kg!

Robin

I can have a go at most of them...

Limited : top professional quality lenses, metal construction. top prices
smc : 'super multi coated' the pentax anti-reflection coating
sdm : 'supersonic' motor in the lens for focusing - quieter and faster than screw drive autofocus.
D-FA : D is digital lenses, reduced image circle, not suitable for 35mm film - not sure how this is different from D or DA.
FA-J : as FA but no manual aperture ring I think (aperture only set from body)
IF : internal focus - the lens does not change length with focusing.
AL : ? lens contains one or more aspheric elements
ED : ? extra-low dispersion glass (reduces chromatic aberration)
FA : Autofocus lens with aperture ring suitable for 35mm (how does this differ from plain F? Is it to do with transmitting focal distance to the body?)
DA* : top (professional?) quality lens (again D for digital image circle)
D/DA : normal quality digital lenses (not sure what the difference is).

I'm sure someone else will be along in a mo to correct my errors and omissions...

Robin

Sorry, got my acronyms muddled - should have been ACPI not APIC (that's advanced configuration and power interface not advanced programmable interrupt controller...)

Anyway, even if you don't have this in your bios, you can get the same effect by manually choosing the HAL (hardware abstraction layer) when windows XP installs. Do this by pressing F5 when you were pressing F6 for loading the SATA driver (hopefully there's some way to do both). More on this at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/299340.

Getting the wrong HAL, or one that is having trouble talking to the hardware due to some incompatibility can definitely lead to big problems with the install - copy files is very slow or fails, often you don't even get past the initial text mode phase of the install.

I expect that you're fed up with the manual steps of the raid installation by now, so it's probably worth 'slipstreaming' the RAID drivers onto an XP installation CD to get rid of the floppy disk/F6 bit. You can also merge the service pack 2 files into the CD so that the installation you get has SP2 loaded automatically (who knows, with SP2 fixes it might even install a bit better). Instructions for all this here: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/How-To--Slipstream-your-XP-installation


best of luck!

Robin

I had a whole heap of grief installing windows XP on my current home system that sounds quite similar - it would take for ever to copy files from the CD or claim that the CD was corrupt. If it did finish copying it would crash pretty soon afterwards.

The fix for me was to go into the bios settings and turn *off* APIC mode. Apparently the windows XP implementation isn't exactly robust and if the motherboard's interpretation is buggy too, everything goes awry.

Worth a try, hope it helps for you.

Robin

If this camera was new (as you said in your other thread), why take it apart when you could have taken it back?

My experience with taking cameras apart is that you end up with a lot of very small fiddly parts which you either lose or cannot fit back into their proper places (fortunately this was a Zenit10, so no great loss...)

Robin

Looks like JBOD is spanning - multiple drives in one partition, rather than RAID 0 which is striped. http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/jbod.htm. I wouldn't put data you care about on either, since if any one of the disks fails, it's gone.

With 3 disks you could go for Raid5 quite nicely, or Raid1 with the 3rd being an offsite backup, since RAID is no more resistant to fire or theft than boring single disk drives

The NSLU2 doesn't support RAID in the default firmware, but apparently you can if you reflash to a complete linux OS (http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/FAQ/RAID). I'm sure that some of the more expensive NAS hardware devices would support this out-of-the box.

Robin

Especially since Peter says he already has a 160Gb drive going spare ... Depending on where you put this sort of thing, noise can be an issue too.

Robin

I happened to have a plug-in power meter lying around, so I just tried it on the NLSU2 to find the real power - with a memory stick in one of the USB ports (no hard disks) it draws 4-5W. The PSU is rated 5V 2A. Theoretically each of the 2 USB ports should be able to supply 500ma @5V, which would take to total power draw pretty much up to 10W.

If power is really important to you, you might want to consider getting a laptop style hard disk rather than a desktop one, as the power draw will be considerably lower.

Robin