Interesting week. Little things, mostly compy-related.
My dad–aged 85–called up with a boot issue. Pretty smart guy sbout this stuff, especially for someone who spent better than 70 years before ever even being exposed to using one of the things. Followed directions well and we traced the problem very quickly to a dead CMOS battery. Sent him pictures, a diagram and instructions and he was cool with the whole thing, *heh* Gives him a reason to play with his grounding strap.
On the other end of the spectrum, the guy that was on the other end of the line when my dad first called is clueless about computers. I picked his up the next day. His WinXP install was well and truly trashed, and the only real fixes were to either hope a repair install fixed things or a complete reinstall. Since he didn’t have the original WinXP install CD, I dug a lil further. Yep. Was not going to shell out one of MY licenses to reinstall Windows (his “license” was… apparently a lil hinky). When the repair install failed, I eschewed attempting a reinstallation using the product key it’d been installed with and just installed Puppy Linux for him, since he insisted all he used the thing for was surfing and email–and there was NOTHING in any email store for any email client, so he meant all webmail.
[Edit: his response when I got it back to him and set up: “It’s never been this fast!” Of course not, it was dragging one of the Queen Elizabeth’s anchors (WinXP) behind it all the way… Even his online java gaming was faster. But, a caveat for folks who do need java/java plugins. Installing/enabling java/java plugins is not all that straightforward in Puppy Linux and involves a LOT of typing at the command line, although some of that can be relieved by some creative mousing–something I was reduced to because of my typo-laden command line “skills” *heh* Still, dragging a plugin or executable to create a hard link where one is needed is easier than typing a long string into the command line and avoids easily-created errors, so I’m not ashamed to admit doing it. 🙂 Configuring browsers to use java after all the background installation and links to plugins has been done is a trivial task, though.]
Puppy’s ideal for him anyway, since the computer is a 700Mhz box with only 256MB of RAM and a 10GB hard drive almost full of programs he never used because they were “inaccessible” to the WinXP that’d been installed over Win98. I don’t imagine he’s got any complaint with running Puppy instead of WinXP, since WinXP had been installed over what was there when he got it from a dump.
Oh, finally got my first opportunity of 2009 to help my Wonder Woman down at one of her libraries, yesterday afternoon. She wanted to move her office computer to the other side of the room from her desk, but keep her monitor, keyboard and mouse on her desk. Easy-peasy. A looooong monitor cable extension (about 2+X the diameter of her original monitor cable, with a humongous amount of shielding, etc.) routed around the wall took care of the monitor issue. Since her office computer’s a Gateway (a very nice, very capable P4 that is several orders of magnitude better than the Dells the school system bought for student use in the libraries), I found her a nice Gateway RF wireless mouse/keyboard combo. Took more time moving and re-routing cables, bundling things up in wire loom, etc., than you might think, but at the end, actualized the mouse/keyboard and she was away to the races.
Fun. (Oh, I bought a second set for me, so I can slide back a few feet, put my feet up on my keyboard drawer and–with a lil “mousing table” nearby–set Opera to 200% and laze through an eBook. *heh* Places the monitor 6′ or better away from my eyes, but really easy easy to read that way.
*heh* I just love freebies. Someone asked me to evaluate using a DirectTV R15 receiver for an offlist purpose. It didn’t work out and I let ’em know why. Emailed me back: “Keep the thing.” Now I have a spare 160GB hard drive, pulled from it. Nice. And I know just where I’ll put it–as slave to an 80GB drive in an old 900Mhz system with 512MB memory. I’ll partition the things into 40GB partitions, I think so I can dual boot Puppy Linux and Windows 98. Maybe. I read an interesting article about virtualization with Puppy, so I might give that a shot. 512MB of memory is pretty slim to do virtualization with, IMO, but between the parsimony Puppy treats memory with and the relatively low memory needs of Win98, I might be able to do it.
Didn’t get to the P.O. until after 4:30 yesterday. I wonder what the package is that was too big for our box?
I’m running about 3-1 this week on answering machine messages on my POTS line as opposed to voicemail on my VOIP phone. Hmmm… If I dropped my POTS line, do you think more people would call my VOIP phone? I like having my messages emailed to me, since I’m almost always at a computer–either mine or someone else’s. I hate cell phone voicemail, and I keep my cell phone turned off ALL the time, unless I’m making calls, so my VOIP phone is “my” phone. Heck, I make more local calls on it than I do on our POTS line.
Oh, BTW, back at the Puppy Linux thing: installing Puppy Linux to a hard drive from the live CD is now a trivial operation. A little wizard just copies over the image from the live CD… though minus one critical element that must be “installed” separately, so booting that installation is something else. The GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader) installation wizard isn’t quite as straighforward, definitely not “Aunt Tilly” ready, IMO. After a couple of tries using it, I just looked up the GRUB boot config file it had created and did a little editing to make the thing work. Notaproblem, really, but I don’t expect the “Aunt Tillies” of the world to go for that. Close, but no cigar.
OTOH, for someone who just surfs the web and does email, booting a live CD Puppy Linux session could be all the computer they need, and Aunt Tilly could handle that (once Nerdy Nephew ran the easy-peasy network wizard that does work well and shows her where to CLICK to install PET packaged software, in case she needs more than is in the standard installation).
Today: day of R&R and bumaround chores. First thing: pick up that package at the P.O. Then, grocery shopping, library and little things like that. Easy day. Maybe get an afternoon nap. I hope.
If I keep myself focused on the ordinary things of life, maybe I’ll not brood over the little things like The One being the very first newly-inaugurated president to skip out on the Salute to Heroes Inaugural Ball since it was begun 56 years ago… (h.t. MoreWhat) Whatabum.
