At some point in between feeding my Twitter addiction and getting a Poker website ready I decided to reformat my big computer after putting up with a few problems for a long, long time. Silverlight was bombing on me, Google Chrome was locking up (blaming Flash) and nothing really worked as it was meant to.
The initial reformat and reinstall went OK, but during the Windows Update->Reboot cycle I got a Blue Screen of Death and things went downhill from there.
My SATA refused to boot. Thinking this could simple be a corrupt MBR problem I booted from my XP CD into the recovery console, tried FIXMBR and FIXBOOT and restarted. I got the same problem – invalid system disk – an decided to reformat again completely. Two hours town the pan so far, but what the hey.
No deal – I still can’t boot from SATA, so I waded through the BIOS options, resetting to safe defaults and going from there, and still my SATA won’t fire up. I eventually removed the Work drive to a safe place and reformatted my backup drive – a 250GB PATA that’s normally in a removable mobile rack – to boot from. This went OK, and I installed Windows, Office and all the combined updates for both.
What’s annoying is that the SATA drives themselves are absolutely fine, mounting in Windows no problem – I just can’t boot from the damned things. I’ve tried all three that I own, two 120s and a 250GB, and they all respond the same. No booting.
I still needed a backup drive, so I plonked down £9.98 on a SATA mobile rack and reformatted the 250 SATA for use as a backup. The idea is that I copy all the files over from C: and D: (now partitions on the 250 PATA, rather than individual SATAs) using SyncToy 2.0 and yank it to store in a safe place. I originally had both my work drive and backup drive encrypted with TrueCrypt, but I just don’t want to push my luck right now.
So now I he a pair of 120GB SATAs sat doing nothing. I could possibly set them up in a simple striped RAID0 config so store my work on, then reformat the PATA as one big lump, but do I really want to go through all that hassle? It’s not as if I need the space.
The battery in my tiny laptop has struggled to hold a charge properly for the last few weeks, so I decided now would be a great time to partake in the battery exchange programme and get this unit swapped out for a non-Sony-blow-uppable one.
I removed the battery and entered the serial numbers into the Fujitsu site, completed my name and address and submitted the form. ETA on a new battery was 4-6 weeks due to the model – which is no longer available – but I was pleasantly suprised to receive a replacement via TNT this morning, a little over a week later.
The battery already held some charge and seems to be holding well so far. With the lower risk of the thing setting fire to my nuts, I’m pretty happy with the entire situation. All that remains is for me to send the old battery back in the pre-paid TNT envelope provided, and we’re done.
Update: 20 Jan. The new battery makes a vast, vast difference to how the laptop operates. It may be my imagination, but YouTube videos are much smoother now, and my whole usability experience is slightly less frustrating.
One this that has definitely improved is the recharge temperature. The laptop no longer tries to charge the battery when it should be full, and as a result it’s nice and cool when I go to pick it up in the morning.
Microsoft have released the Beta version of Windows 7 for all to see, but for some strange reason they have decided not to use BitTorrent, but to shoulder the bandwidth themselves, making the MS download servers a bit hard to contact right now.
Here’s how I got to the download. All steps were done in Internet Explorer.
Complete the form and submit your details. You may receive a confirmation email.
Next I refreshed the page and was presented with my product key and a download link. The key will work for both 32- and 64-bit versions so it doesn’t matter which you download, although the 64-bit version will handle more memory.
The download uses a Java applet which caused me no end of problems, so I used a direct download link aquired from the URL it was trying to access:
My download is still going and will continue for a few hours yet, so I have no comments on the actual use of Windows 7 Beta. Transfer speeds from Microsoft are still slow as half the developed world tries to download the image at the same time, so have patience.
Enjoy, and if you have any comments, leave them below.
Update: Installed and Working
I don’t know if it’s just me being used to Windows XP, or if I don’t have all the necessary drivers installed or something like that, but Windows 7 just doesn’t seem as snappy as I had hoped for. Obviously I will have to play with it some more…
After a recent disaster of epic proportions that was made all the worse by not having an Internet connection, I bought myself a USB Mobile Broadband Modem – all the mobile phone shops are touting them at the moment but I decided (not sure why) to get mine direct from Three. Ordered it late on Wednesday afternoon and it arrived on Friday morning.
It’s bigger than a USB memory stick but not massively so. I plumped for the white one which looks rather spiffing, and it comes with a white USB extension cable, a few leaflets and a SIM card. It mounts as a CD-Rom drive and the software is on the stick itself, so no discs to lose. Your SIM fits in a tight little jacket which slides into the unit just below the USB connector and stays out of sight from there on. There’s also a MicroSD slot, so it can act as a regular USB memory stick as well.
Three USB Modem
Three USB Modem
Three USB Modem
The first time I plugged it in the internal memory mounted. Double-clicking on it auto-booted the installer and… That was it. No muss no fuss. The software checks for updates (which I downloaded over Wifi rather than use up my allowance) and is generally unobtrusive, comprising a small window with a network status display and a big red Connect/Disconnect button.
I connected to 3G on the first attempt despite only having three bars. Access was impressively quick – this one goes up to 2.8Mb I think – and there were no problems connecting over Telnet or anything like that. It pretty much did exactly what it said on the tin.
Three USB Software
A couple of months ago I installed a bandwidth meter on my small laptop and found that I used 1.3GB (combined up/down) over the 30 day trial period of the software. Since I use WiFi and even wired where possible, I can quite easily get away with just 1GB a month, costing me a ternner, without worrying about extra charges.
So far so good! I’ve done a little bit of web browsing on it and checked my email while doing 60mph on the M180 (no, not driving) and it’s all been spot on so far.
Update: 10th November
There was a brief period of about half an hour this morning where there was no three network available at all and I couldn’t connect. It was annoying that I actually wanted to do something at that time as well. It’s back on now (using it to post in fact).
While looking round for some free entertainment I came across a great arcade racing sim called ‘Track Mania Nations’ over at TrackMania.com – free to download and play.
Imagine, if you will, the classic Stunt Car Racer from the Amiga days, but with massive updated graphics and F1-style cars instead of old bangers. Extend the race types to include acrobatics, speed races and obstacle courses and you’ve got Track Mania. The full version includes different scenes and weather conditions as well as cars, but the free version is worthy of your bandwidth.
The ‘Nations’ bit of the game title refers to the fact that there are millions of people all around the world competing. You can challenge people online or play solo, and can check your Global, Country and Regional rank. I’m currently in the top 15,000 in England, apparently, or maybe it was Britain as a whole. I don’t actually know if that’s any good.
In the solo game there are no other car on the track as such, but you do see the current Medal-winning performance running alongside you (It’s a ghost car so it can’t ram you off the track) as well as your own fastest performance, so you can see where you need to adjust your driving to win. Racing lines are very important but there’s a little bit of luck involved as well, especially on rough ground.
Most of the races are single-lap affairs that only last 30 seconds or so and they increase in difficulty as you progress, though there are a couple that seem out of place in the learning curve. Occasionally you’ll find a track where it seems impossible to meet the Gold Medal time, which brings me to the games only major fault.
If there’s one thing that lets Track Mania down it’s the fact that the Gold Medal times – the runs you have to beat to get gold – are frustratingly difficult. Touch the wall once, even the gentlest of kisses, and your ‘opponent’ will disappear off into the distance.
That said, perseverance pays dividends and can propel you up the Global Rankings 10,000 places at a time for every medal you win.
The graphics are simply stunning and very quick. 1600×1200 on an nVidia 6600 and a 2GHz AMD CPU looks absolutely gorgeous with no slowdown. The only thing missing from the game is crash damage when you inevitably get too excited and slam into a wall, pillar or miss the track completely – though the water effects make up for the latter.
If I can convince others to get it installed and give it a whirl I’ll give the multiplayer a try as well – it can only get better!
Everyone and his dog seems to be banging on about Google Chrome today, just a couple of days after launch, so this post will undoubtedly be lost in the sea of rants and raves on the subject. In the few hours I’ve been using it, I’ve found a few bugs:
The ‘Most Visited Pages’ front page only adds non-local-language pages if you visit the root domain name first. If you visit, for example, http://blah.jp/english/ then it won’t be added.
Disk access is horrendously excessive, bring smaller machines to a halt.
SELECT/OPTION elements with “background-color:transparent;”, or with a background image, appear black.
In preparation for our upcoming trip to Tokyo I decided to check with airline KLM to ensure that my booking was complete and seats reserved. I toddled off to the KLM website using Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 (since the window happened to be open) and was promptly informed that my browser wasn’t supported (click the image to the right).
The stupid thing about the method of detection they’ve employed is that it’s all JavaScript based, since the website loads without problems and then redirects to the error message. Once there, you can simply opt to continue using your current browser anyway and the site works without problems. Amazing!
The problem, of course, extends from using the browser’s UserAgent string to make a guess at compatibility. In this case a newer version of an existing browser, which you would reasonably expect to have the same feature set, has caused problems simply through not being recognised.
The answer is not to do any browser detection and – assuming your site is complex enough to warrant it – simply provide a link to a technical problems help page. Writing your site in a non-browser-specific way should be a no-brainer these days, too.
The missingMajordomoCf error crops up while trying to add a site if your Base Maillist package is not installed for whatever reason. In our case it was a problematic update which cause it to be removed, but you may also have uninstalled it manually to sidestep MajorDomo spam.
Reinstalling the package is simple, but the files are not signed, so before you start you need to turn off the GPG Check for the BlueQuartz repository. To do this, edit the file /etc/yum.repos.d/BlueQuartz-Base.repo and change gpgcheck=1 to gpgcheck=0.
Now you can perform a yum install base-maillist* and the package will be reinstalled without errors. Once done, change gpgcheck back to 1 as detailed above and all should be well.
Voila! No more missingMajordomoCf error! Hopefully.
As many people whose work revolves around the Internet I tend to stick to the same few sites because quite frankly I don’t have time to sit at Google surfing for new sources of news all day. I recently added Digg.com to my list of sites to visit, and that’s where Firefox started to get annoying.
Digg isn’t the only site to highlight the problem, but in my little closed world of bookmarks it’s the one that shows up problems the most because it sends you all over the Internet. After a few pages on the site, Firefox starts to seriously chug, weighed down, seemingly, by the sheer number of ads on the sites it links to.
This is partly my fault because I like to open a link in a new tab and browse for more links while those new pages load – I don’t like sitting around waiting for a page to load. Sadly, Firefox would sit waiting for an ad to load from some random subdomain and that would hold up the operation of the entire browser – I would sometimes be unable to do simple things like switch tabs or scroll a document because m.blah.some.domain.com was slow in serving me a flash ad. It was getting so bad I almost switched back to Internet Explorer.
Thankfully, Firefox 3.0 RC1 was made available and the problem seems to have been resolved, or at least reduced so much as to be unworthy of note. It may simply be because pages load so much quicker now, but I’ve yet to run into the waiting-for-ads problem that plagues this new-fangled ad-funded internet. My gut instinct is that something in the whole multi-threadedness of the browser has been fixed big time, and it works like a charm so far.
CPU and memory usage also seem to be down at first glance, and the whole browser seems much snappier and faster. Applicaton loading times are about the same, but once loaded it positively flies along.
This is a major improvement for the leading OS browser, worthy of a download and no mistake.
On the weekend I went off to Scotland to climb Ben Nevis my router decided to pack in on me. No amount of resetting, prodding, poking or power starvation would fix it – the power LED would glow, flickering slightly, and that was that.
A whole month later I finally get time to sit down and contact Netgear about it. The process is fairly straightforward and we arrange for A NOVO to come and collect the duff unit, with CityLink due to drop a new one in sometime in the week.
Except yesterday, while I was packing up the unit ready for collection, the Cable Modem decided to quit. It’s worth mentioning that this is the original Motorola Surfboard modem that can back in the day when Diamond Cable was my provider and NTL was nothing but a distant rumour. I think it had been on for roughly seven years straight.
Calling the 25p/min support number got me straight through to a helpful customer service rep who arranged for a new modem to be delivered in 5-7 days, so for the time being I am completely without internets at home.
