Category: Compgeeky

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Well, I’m Keepin’ the T-Bird…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkBr0fxqr9w

Yeh, yeh, I don’t have a T-Bird, but I had fun, fun fun, didn’t I? 😉

What?!?

It’s been a little over a year now since I picked up this lil Asus P50IJ notebook. It’s been really useful for web browsing, email, a few VMs (mostly Linux VMs) and other light computing stuff. Like it. About a month after I bought it, I went ahead and used an extra (perfectly legal, from Technet Plus membership) license for Win7 Ultimate to do “Windows Anytime Upgrade” from the Win7 Home Premium (just two features I wanted, and I ought to have used a Win7 Pro license instead, I guess).

But as with all Windows installs, after a time things became crufted, system files became screwed up, etc. It happens. I use a few techniques and utilities to keep things relatively clean, but… it’s Windows, you know?

So, time for a reinstall. But. I hate backing up (although I do that anyway), wiping, reinstalling Windows, then reinstalling applications, etc. So…

Non-destructive reinstall. Just the ticket, right? Simply pop in the appropriate Windows installation DVD and select Upgrade when the prompt finally loads for Upgrade or Custom Installation. Seems simple enough. Continue reading “Well, I’m Keepin’ the T-Bird…”

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Just Askin’

Saw this on the “home” page* for my lil toy 15.6″ Asus, an OK lil thing with notalotta horsepower but just enough for common tasks, and wondered…

“The ASUS P50IJ notebook is the best business computing companion you could ever own…”

Really? What about that sexy slave girl with the abacus over there? Hmmm?

Continue reading “Just Askin’”

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A Kid Again

In 1959, we were a single income family, even though both of my parents were college graduates. My dad was making decent money working in a field not known for particularly good incomes. Still with five children, the budget was sometimes a tad tight. So, when my folks decided to buy a World Book Encyclopedia with all the trimmings, including ten years of “yearbooks” and a large (no, REALLY large, “library-sized”) two-volume dictionary set, our lil family library grew by almost 25% overnight, and I found my backup reading material for the next few years.

Yes, there was always at least one volume of the set under my bed, close enough for a night time “sneak read”. Sometimes, it was just one of the two dictionary volumes (yes, for reading), but most often it was just a volume chosen according to some topic that had caught my fancy, then kept for further reading as one article led to another and another and…

And that’s how I get to be a kid again. For the last 18 years the web has been my go-to reading material for times when I’ve exhausted my stash of new books. It’s also been my substitute for an encyclopedia, since I never run out of things to learn. And thanks to my *cough* encyclopedic reading habits over the years, I have a skill set and basic knowledge base that allows me to filter out most crap.

And the resources–good quality resources–are effectively limitless, now, and not confined to one book case. Heck, I find myself re-reading classics online that are in a book case that’s literally within the reach of my right hand as I type these words.

And on top of being a library with more than enough resources to keep me in learning material for life, the web’s a source of amusement (dumbasses a-plenty to poke fun at! Yipee! *heh*), entertainment (I have a full movie list at Crackle, for example), contemporary information (I’ll not say it’s “news”) and interpersonal interactions.

But most of all, it’s a resource just jam packed with information that’s either new to me or in a new format that makes sense in a different way or old information that’s fun to re-read, review and cogitate over.

Sweet. Kid. In a candy store. Unlimited candy budget.

*sigh* I’ve entered my second childhood.

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“Tablets are for people who hate computers”?

I saw that headline and immediately thought, “?!? No! Tablets are for STUPID people who hate computers and are so massively stupid that they don’t realize that tablets ARE computers.”

And of the person who wrote the headline? A supposed tech writer.

[audio:What-a-maroon.mp3]

Oh, and tablets are sooooo far behind the curve compared to computers I’ve dreamt of for years. *heh*

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One Thing to Like About Kindle for PC

while I generally don’t much care for the formatting, pagination, text sizing options, etc., in the Kindle for PC app, I do like that fact that I can go from one device to another and simply resume reading where I left off on the previous device. I understand it works pretty much that way between the Kindle and other devices as well.

That’s a Good Thing since I tend to have several books “in process” at once, and with eBooks I generally read on more than one PC–my preferred reading device for eBooks, largely because of screen size, greater flexibility in the way the screen displays text, and old eyes.

Having the app keep a thumb in the text, as it were, and open where I last was is nice.

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Neat Lil Betatool

Opera has decided that those of us who voluntarily strap on the latest nightly builds and take off into the wild should have something different to play with. The call it Opera Next. It installs separately from one’s regular Opera build and is self-updating with whatever latest build is out–a new alpha? Fine! Won’t impact one’s regular install. Handy. It even has a White icon instead of the normal red Opera “O” so it’s easy even for me to keep track of. *heh*

I’ve been loading alphas and betas of Opera for some years now on Windows and ‘nix computers alongside standard releases, and this really does make it easy to not accidentally *cough* update the wrong installation. 😉

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The Absent-Minded Techie

So, rebooted after some Win7 updates on this Win7 compy. Didn’t really have to, but although I’ve not had the problems with Win7 requiring regular reboots that I’ve had with other Windows versions, I’ve generally made it a practice to reboot after updates whether it was required or not. Besides, it’d been quite a while since this computer had been booted and I wanted the lil script that automagically defrags my swap file and Registry Hives to run.

But, “non-system disk error” on reboot gave me a moment’s pause. Checked the optical drive. Nope. No unbootable optical disk there. “Hmmm, am I going to have to check the cables, run a rescue CD, what?”

Nah. I’d plugged a USB floppy drive in a couple of weeks ago to check some old floppies for usable data. Left one in. BIOS was looking there for a boot disk. Ejected the floppy and CTRL+ALT+DELed the thing. All’s well. Just another example of what can happen when I’m short a few cupsa coffee.

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Passing Shot at Windoze

OK, I use Windows. I have to for various reasons. But I still have some ‘nix boxes–mostly VMs–because I really like some of the Linux and BSD distros that are out, and I just like FOSS period.

I also like Windows 7, for the most part. Definitely THE best desktop OS from Microsoft since Win2K Pro, IMO.

But.

Showed Son&Heir just ONE of the advantages of a modern ‘nix OS. I had done some work on a Toshiba A205 that required putting a new OS on it (long story), so I installed Linux Mint 10–based on Ubuntu 10.04 but much slicker and with all the multimedia codecs necessary for an ordinary Windows user to be able to make the switch easily. So, booted the thing. About 30 seconds. Shut it down. About 6 seconds. Yep. To fully off.

Heck, it takes one of my Win7 boxes 45 seconds to resume from sleep mode! And shutting it off? Longer.

Advantage: Linux Mint.

BTW, while it’s a really cool distro to use in converting an average Windows user over to a ‘nix OS, PC-BSD 8.2 is just too cool for school.

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*sigh* I Told ‘Em So

Remember this from the other day?

 

 

Well, I told the so-called “telephone support tech” that it wasn’t on my end. Sure enough, here’s what things were like when the field tech called to see if I still needed him to check my end:

 

I relayed that info to the local field service tech while he was on the phone with me, asking if I still needed him to come by and check my equipment (cos that’s the way then “idjits” in phone support wrote it up, of course) and he clued me in. It seems that my area’s infrastructure is being converted from overhead lines for the primary feeds to buried cable (long overdue), and we should have received notice of temporary interruptions or degradation of service. Of course we did not… as have none of the other folks who’ve called in with the same issues.

Communication’s wonderful when it happens, but I have noticed over the years that a growing number of supposedly service-oriented businesses are failing to communicate critical information in a timely fashion, if at all, to those they supposedly serve. And responding to critical information communicated to them by customers? Also flagging. This is especially true of businesses that have nominal government licensed monopolies for a particular service in a designated area. (I had to pester one company for six months to get them to actually test their equipment and find what I already knew from my own diagnostics: that it was faulty and in need of replacement. Six months.)

I do appreciate our cable company’s local field service tech guys, though. Knowledgeable, competent, informative: they’re the best thing th company has going for them, IMO, especially since phone support is so sucky.

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I Hate Working on Laptops

That is, I hate doing repairs to laptops–all those finicky parts and often weird construction/deconstruction/reconstruction methods required. (I don’t mind using laptops. :-))

But that said, I just love this site:

Laptop Keys.com. When the very (VERY) nice Asus laptop Son&Heir bought a couple of years ago had a broken keycap–the latching mechanism and keycup were fine, but the clips on the keycap itself were toast–the only remedy Asus had to offer was sending the whole computer in for a complete keyboard replacement.

WTF?!?

The place he bought it could get us a replacement keyboard to install ourselves (and provide detailed instructions for installation), but why? That’s a LOT of hassle just to replace a keycap.

Enter Laptop Keys.com. $5+S/H (another buck and a quarter or so at the time for simple first class USPS, IIRC–steep for the postage, but what the heck, the thing was still cheap). Popped the new keycap on and bob’s your uncle.

Every time I make someone’s lappy keyboard “whole” for them so easily, it’s a win for both of us. Gotta love Laptop Keys.com–and no, they give me nothing to say that. (And I might hope to get a steak dinner out of a pleased user. *heh*)

“Fixing” a keyboard on a laptop that’s just missing a couple of keycaps (when the user just doesn’t want to do it for themselves, no mtatter how dead simple, easy-peasy it is) is one of the few repairs to laptops I just don’t mind doing.

Unless it’s Lovely Daughter’s Escape key on her lil HP Mini 110. That thing was designed by Satan himself, I think… *heh*