Letters From Home

I am never particularly eager to embrace new technology.  However, having been lent a new computer running Vista Ultimate, I have ventured timidly into the latest iteration of Mr. Bill’s Brand.

Vista’s not as annoying as I thought it would be, but that’s largely due to my immediately dumping all the shiny-shiny stuff and optimizing for best performance rather than best appearance.  I also took back the classic menus and folder view.  After that, I just cruised right along.

It won’t let me create user accounts, though, no matter what I try.  Doesn’t surprise me, given that this came from a corporation that imaged it to their own specs, but it’s annoying.  But given how many other ways it could have annoyed me a lot more, that’s not so bad.

And tonight I figured that having Vista would actually be a good thing, for the first time ever.  Netflix won’t let me watch streaming video on my usual computer, because I run Windows 2000 on it and refuse to change that until the day it no longer does what I want it to do.  But the Netflix viewer will run on Vista, so I decided to try that out.

Well, there’s a hitch in the gitalong–it only works with IE and I only use IE when I’ve got no choice.  But I suppose experimenting with streaming video is worth it.  So I fired up the little blue E, installed the viewer…

….and now I can watch my favorite episode of “McCloud,” which was one of my favorite shows.  “The Night New York Turned Blue.”  Oh, the sacrifices I make for seeing Dennis Weaver and JD Cannon ride again.

photo credit: Digital Sextant.

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I often joke that I’m The Queen of Yesterday’s Technology.  Oh, I keep my eye on what’s new and I pay attention to the gadgets I think it would be great to have.

Then I wait till a newer model comes out and everyone’s dumping the old ones.  That’s how I got my first laser printer (waited till Epson came out with a new model and then I bought their former top of the line) and my first Toshiba laptop (actually, in that case I waited six years to buy a formerly top of the line model) and my first iPod (a refurbished first-gen nano) and my second iPod (a “broken” 4th gen that I bought on eBay and fixed) and my third (a “broken” fifth-gen ditto).

My philosophy is that just because something’s been replaced by a newer model doesn’t mean that the original is any less good.  The quality is still there.  It’s just that there’s a flashier one that attracts people’s attention, so the price of the old one finally goes down to where I feel it’s a good investment.

Now, I’ve been called Mesozoic and worse, by the gotta-have-it folks who think I’m forever burdening myself with second best.  But, like I said, I keep up with what’s good and what’s new and that includes keeping an eye on the whizbang stuff that turns out to be more like whizzfizzle.  So, when comes time for me to buy whatever-it-is, I know it’s already tried and true.

Plus there are lots of instructions out there on the web explaining how to get around idiosyncracies and hardware glitches and so forth.

What inspired this particular rumination?  Fixing the lid latch on my Titanium Powerbook G4 and then downloading an episode of “Rome” to be played on my newly fixed iPod.

Life is good.

photo credit: mrdavisdc

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So, I’m still fiddling around with Vista.

It is nowhere near as annoying as I feared it would be, but it’s just another iteration of Microsoft’s “You are too stupid to figure anything out for yourself” mind-set, and therefore falls all over itself trying to protect the user from ever having to oh, actually think.

I’ve shut off as many of those annoyances as I can, but I still haven’t been able to create new user accounts that work. I ran into a problem with Office 2000 (not enough memory, my ass) but found a workaround. Adobe 8 didn’t want to install itself right away, but Vista sent it out for updates and then it worked fine.

I have had no problems with installing anything so far, either from my own disks or downloaded. Of course, I haven’t had time to put it to any really extensive tests.

I can’t see any reason why anyone would want to run right out and buy this, but then again I never figured out why so many suck uh, people wanted to stand in line for Windows 95, either.

photo credit: ₣ңєя ™

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I’m a command-line kinda computer user.  Always felt that the point-and-click interface was rather like taking a shower in a raincoat, and got in the way of efficiently getting work done.  I stuck with DOS up till very recent times, precisely because you could Get Things Done with it.   Alas, my favorite word processor (Word 5.0 for DOS) ended up with severe Y2K issues, and CompuServe went to a brain-dead system that wouldn’t allow for automated access any more.  So the best of the best DOS software wasn’t enough any more and I had to start using Windows.

Bleah.

It’s odd, then, that I didn’t take to Linux sooner than I did.  It has a wonderfully efficient command-line interface in addition to its GUI overlay, and the commands themselves are logical once you learn the language.   It’s my kinda stuff.  But Linux is the tenth operating system I’ve learned and I guess I thought my poor old brain would leak if I tried it.  So I didn’t experiment with it at all until very recently.

My daughter kindly gave me her HP Pavilion laptop when she got a newer one, and finally I got annoyed enough at Windows XP Home (on that computer–won’t sully another one with XP of any variety) that it dawned on me that it would be a good time to work with Linux a bit more.  We’d put Ubuntu on the server, and I’d fiddled with that a bit, so I installed that on the HP dual-booted with XP.

But it was slooooooooooooooooooow.  I don’t really know why, either, since the laptop is in no way underpowered.  And I wasn’t thrilled with the burnt-orange color scheme, either, to be honest.  So when I saw a mention of Xubuntu on the Lifehacker site, I decided to give that a try instead.

I like it, so far.  It seems to run faster, the blue color scheme is better (yeah, I know, I could have changed the other one but I didn’t) and the sheer joy of logical software with a whole universe of free apps is still very much apparent.  I could definitely get to like this stuff.

Unfortunately I can’t dump XP completely because there are some apps that won’t play nice with Windows 2000 (yes, I’m looking at YOU, Amazon music downloader) but I can assign XP to as small a partition as I think I can get away with, and have the laptop boot into Xubuntu.  Thus, I will learn more.  I will be the Queen of the Command Line once again!
photo credit: coxy

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I finally got all the computer mayhem straightened out, but it sure did cause me a giant case of the wim-wams there for a while.

And I learned a couple new things, like how to get rid of unwanted passwords, and how to force a reluctant computer to boot from the proper hard drive.  I also learned that a Western Digital hard drive won’t work in an external enclosure but a Seagate drive will.  And I got Acronis TrueImage working, with a little help from their tech support, and it does indeed clone drives perfectly.

Oh, and I learned that the lawnmower noise my computer was making was not the hard drive after all but one of the fans, probably in the power supply.  Can we all say DUH!!! together, now?

So that “resolution” gets things back on more or less an even keel at least for the moment.

The other resolution is that I’m not messing with that stuff EVER again.  My son will get a new computer eventually and transferring his stuff from one to the other is going to be entirely in his hands.

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It all seemed so easy.

I was going to clone the contents of my son’s hard drive to a new, larger hard drive, and then set him up with a newer computer. I have software that will deal with that. Or so I thought.

I got Maxtor MaxBlast with my newest hard drive, and it offered to let me upgrade to Acronis TrueImage at an attractive price. So I took them up on that. Unfortunately, I can’t install TrueImage because it’s an upgrade copy and it keeps asking me for the serial number of the previous version, and MaxBlast has no serial number. I emailed Acronis about this two days ago and have only got their form “we got your email” reply.

I tried using the MaxBlast software on the computer I was trying to refurbish, but it says it won’t run without a Maxtor or Seagate drive present. Um… there were three drives in the computer at the time–a WD, a Maxtor, and a Seagate. *BZZZT!*

It was all moot anyway, because my son’s original hard drive refused to be moved. If I tried it in the other computer it promptly lost its mind and I got all kinds of scary looking “missing boot device” messages on the Blue Screen of Death.

So I gave up and put everything back together in his room… and that’s when the fun started.

All of a sudden Windows 2000 was asking for a logon password when it never had before. My son didn’t remember his password. Logging in as Administrator did no good. So, OK, I’ll try running the Windows 2000 CD and see if I can repair the installation.

Uh…. now the BIOS wants a password too? Aiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeee!!! Sure am glad my son had long since left for work.

In the end, I took my own advice and learned a LOT of new things today. Like how to reset a CMOS password, which is something I already knew how to do in theory but had never tried. Till tonight. And how to get past a Windows password, too, although I haven’t actually done that yet. Oh my, the internet is my friend.

I think, all in all, I’m going to just let things be for the moment and tackle the rest of that project tomorrow. I love fiddling with computers but I’m not about to push my luck.

photo credit: Stoichiometry

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