Well the other day I was having some hardware problems or something and I could not get to the bottom of it. I thought if only there were some way to find out what happened. Then I thought about it and realized there could be some sort of black box that could record critical changes to the BIOS and other system critical settings. You could boot the black box instead of a normal hard drive, cd drive, ect. Then you could fix what happened. This could also reset your entire pc to its original settings. So what does everyone think?

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Well, the BIOS itself may eventually expand and make a good home for a black box in the future.

There has been some projects and ideas about enhancing the BIOS (because the BIOS is truly independent on a ordinary PC), by making it more flexible, powerful and user friendly. The idea is about making the BIOS be able to receive input not only from keyboards, but from other pointing devices (e.g. an ordinary PC mouse), and make the BIOS be able to have a file browser that can read and edit the contents of your disk. Unfortunately, it will take some time until this idea is realized. After all, there are a bunch of file systems around (FAT, FAT32, HPFS, NTFS, Ext2, Ext3, ReiserFS and CD file systems etc. and there is a problem when accessing SCSI hard disks also) and such a "mini OS" can't handle them all. However, it would be neat if the BIOS could monitor dangerous system operations (and warn users about it) such as changing the MBR (master boot sector) of the hard disk, formatting the hard disk, overclocking your CPU, RAM or graphics card, or stop a virus that is trying to access vital parts of the computers operating system.

Maybe that "black box" can even have it's own hard disk, and when you shut down your PC, it would copy the entire contents of your hard disk to the black boxes backup hard disk, so you can restore your PC without problems when there is a need to do so.

Let's hope that this idea comes true, because operating systems today cannot interact very well with the BIOS. For example, the cpu overheating protection (Asus calls this C.O.P.) that most motherboards have is working pretty well. When your CPU overheats, the PC shuts down. But, that's about it! You don't actually know what happened! This could scare the pants of newbie computer users (their PC turned off by itself, what will their reaction be?)! Here's what should be done in my opinion:

Before the PC switched off, it could save the whole RAM contents by not turning off power supply to the RAM (RAM memory looses it's contents when it looses it's power supply). When the CPU cools down, the PC could turn back on and everything will be exactly on your desktop as you left it there (all running programs will continue to run, all your documents will remain untouched). The BIOS should also let the user know that the reason for the sudden PC shutdown is the CPU overheating problem.

This is still in a “blurry idea” phase, so we will have to wait for a while before a PC black box comes to life. The CPU overheating scenario is just an example of what the PC black box should do in cases where data loss and hard disk corruption represent a threat.

 

 

 

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A black box would be a great addition to a PC. If it took up an internal drive and recorded to some form of memory (e.g an SD card or other form of small memory) which could be taken out and read on another PC, with a list of all system changes and software and hardware errors that could explain why a system won't boot for example. This would make diagnostics an awful lot easier and would take some of the guess work out of replacing components or uninstalling software as it could have gone wrong. It could also alert you to when components are getting old or need replacing, or have caused a system error.

A great idea, but will it ever happen?

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I am glad that people are in agreement with me on this. I agree this won't be realized for a long time but I'm sure it will be in computers in a few years.

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You know, why have a black box, if your computer detected the changes ahed of time and changed it back? still, black boxes in a computer would be cool, but you woulden't need them if an error was stopped in the first place. That's one of my little secret projects. It just doesent make sence to me.

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So what that black box really do?
Its like another computer within a computer?

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well if anyone was paying attention toe the longhorn posts thats what microsoft is plan on doing with the the new os, but hte major problem i feel that you fialed to mention that the black box will be a hackers paradise all you is a trojan man and you done

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How does blackbox works? Is it a programs that records everything including the hardware activities and status? How to run this program? sorry this is the first time I heard about such programs as blackbox... can you please tell me more???

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Wow! cool very cool, I like that, If I have that piece of junk in my pc somebody can call me pilot,,, ha ha ha...

I can drive my PC up and down and record all activity inside the blackbox...

See It works like a real airplane... Is blackbox record the signal in monitor or just an encrypted data? I need to know eh..

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Well, yeah!
But, it will share your PC's motherboard, RAM memory, Graphics Card, power supply, etc. It will only have it's own HDD and a small EEPROM chip that will contain that tiny OS.

If you don't know what EEPROM (electrically erasable programmable read only memory) is, take a look:

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/E/EEPROM.html

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