Looking around for some prices on sash windows, I’m having a bit of a problem finding something affordable, although the prices of timber sash windows here are more reasonable than most, and they’re local, which is useful. Wooden box sash windows are the only acceptable solution, especially in a conservation area / listed building.
Computer Problems
March 12th, 2009At 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.
Sigh… Bloody computers.
Download the Microsoft Windows 7 Beta ISO
January 10th, 2009Microsoft 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.
To sign up for a key, go to:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dd353205.aspx
and sign in using your MS Live Id – this can be a simple Hotmail address.
Once signed in, go to this address:
https://www.microsoft.com/betaexperience/productkeys/win7-64/enus/default.aspx
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:
Download the ISO here:
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…
Windows XP Home on Advent 7081 Laptop – ARGH!
March 20th, 2008What kind of logic process does it involve to purposely upset and annoy your customers with crippled products for the sake of a few pence?
A friend of ours was was unfortunate enough to suffer a harddrive failure on her Advent 7081 laptop – not a bad machine really – rendering the drive as dead as the proverbial Dodo. The laptop wouldn’t even POST properly, so I took the drive out – sure enough it got further and asked for a valid media to be inserted. To be double-plus-good sure I stuck the 2.5in drive on an adapter and put it into my main machine. The drive didn’t even show up in the device manager as being damaged – it was completely dead, so I ordered a new one from eBuyer, £40 delivered next day, 80GB. Sweet!
First problem: No restore discs. We hunted high and low for the system restore discs but there was nothing, nor was there a Windows CD anywhere to be found. No, instead of including a few pence worth of plastic, Advent had thoughtfully put the restore sortware on the harddrive. The harddrive that was now dead. Ahahah, great!
So I acquired an original Windows XP Home OEM CD and stuck that in there, but the licence number on the bottom of the laptop – a perfectly legal number supplied with this actual laptop – won’t allow this version of XP to install. I now have the choice of [a] buying a new XP Home pack from somewhere, [b] getting a new set of restore discs from Techguys on 0870 901 6000 (which costs about £30), or [c] trying to find either of the above on eBay.
Who on earth thought this was a good idea? At what point in the marketing progress did someone think it would be OK to screw over future users because it would save the cost of a CD? Not only does it make things awkward, but it uses up HD space that could otherwise be used by the laptop owner. Sheesh!
Moral of the story: Don’t buy a laptop with the restore stuff on the HD. If you have no choice, get something onto removable media ASAP in case you need it.
Windows Vista is a Freakin’ Retard
October 19th, 2007“Unnnngh”, “Arrrrgh!”, “Gnnnnngh” – all sounds that could have been heard by anyone passing my house last night as I wrestled with Windows Vista to try and get it to recognise my 2GB Cruzer Titanium USB Memory stick.
Running Windows Vista Home Basic – the smallest, least complicated (hahahah) version of Vista – with 512MB of RAM was probably my first mistake, since any operation takes ten times longer than necessary once you start hitting the swap file. It took fifteen minutes just to install a couple of driver updates and reboot.
But the main problem – installing a quality USB memory stick from a well-known, reputable manufacturer, just took the cake. I inserted the stick, expecting it to be recognised and installed, but Vista claims it couldn’t be recognised. I left it installed and loaded up the device manager, figuring it could use Windows Update to find a driver, but was politely informed that ”the best device driver was already installed for this device.” This unknown device. Yeah.
Not only that, Vista suggested that I replace the device if it continued to not work. Given that there were important files on it, that’s hardly the best advice I’ve ever received.
Update:
Since I’m in the process of moving the office downstairs, but haven’t actually got to the point whereby I have a desk, I have gotten my Internet fix by digging out an old wireless PCI card I got a while ago and using that. To my surprise, XP picked it up and installed the drivers (from Windows update – via a temporary wire) on the first try and promptly let me use it.
I dread to think what Windows Vista would have done.
Bye bye 2000, Hello XP
September 15th, 2007Another month passes, another format of the big machine. This time I’ve upgraded to Windows XP – something I swore I’d hold off from doing as long as possible.
It came about because I had to do some video editing and K was using Pinnacle Studio to great effect. I bought version 11 and found to my initial dismay that it was XP and Vista only. After weighing my options I figured it wasn’t going to kill me to finally ditch Windows 2000, and ordered the XP OEM CD from eBuyer.
Installation went well, as expected, though I personally disliked having to activate my copy of Windows as soon as it was installed. My first action was to get rid of the standard XP interface and go back to the Windows Classic style I was used to – everything else I think I can live with.
I confess I did cheat somewhat in getting Apache, PHP and MySQL installed and working. I simply made a backup of my existing folders (complete with MySQL data) and config files and, after installing so as to get the services running correctly, I simply copied the folders back over, pausing only to drop php.ini and the hosts file into their respective folders. Total install time, 10 minutes.
All that is left to do now is to upgrade the videocard drivers and find the WinTV install disc, then set up the system to my own preferences.
Work work work.
February 19th, 2007Yeah I know, I haven’t been updating the ol’ website again. I’ve been busy on a massive website with work and juggling other stuff around it. It’s been crazy, but I’m back up to working five days a week again, which is nice. Might be able to pay something off the credit card bill this month.
Precisely because I’ve been so busy, I’ve just not had the get up and go to resume work after a horrible harddrive fuckup that wiped all the data from my backup drive. I’d just reformatted and put the 250GB drive back in to restore my files, when the Win2k boot process decided to scan and fix them all. Yeah, fix them all straight to hell. Everything was gone – photos, emails, contacts, the lot.
Sigh…
I’ve also taken the opportunity to get shut of an old PC and assorted drives by putting a machine together for my sister. She’s inheriting my Athlon 800Mhz system with 512MB RAM. There’s a 10GB C: drive and a 15GB D: drive, plus a DVD ReWriter as E: and – because I couldn’t find a matching blanking plate – a CD-ReWriter as F:. M even managed to find a 4-binder set of PC Know-How, or How-To, or something, for about £4 in the local Oxfam shop.
Things should cool down a little now. Just today I realised that the phone had hardly rung at all and that I wasn’t twitching nervously on the odd occasion that it did. It was quite relaxing, actually.
The Big Reformat – Ubuntu and Windows 2000
February 3rd, 2007Part one of.. who knows how many. I actually started this last night when I got home with the backup portion of the whole farce. Farce? Yeah well nothing’s really gone as smoothly as it did during testing, and there’s really no reason for it all. Granted, I’ve moved from a regular IDE Harddrive to the SATA ones in my machine, but is that really enough to throw things out?
Ubuntu installed without problem, detecting the SATA drive and allowing me to partition it as saw fit. I created two equal partitions of 58,000MB which left something like 1.2GB for Linux Swap. Formatted and installed Ubuntu, no problem. Yet.
Downloaded and installed the nVidia Linux drivers using Alberto Milone’s ”Envy” script, which all went OK, but the desktop just wouldn’t default to 1600×1200 (only one monitor at the moment). I could select it in the nVidia utils and apply it, but it wouldn’t stick.
Installed Windows 2000 on its partition, only for the install to balk at adding some drivers from the motherboard CD and trash the whole thing. I sighed, reformatted and reinstalled the partition and away we went again. Second time lucky, but it took hours to download and install all the frickin’ patches, highlighting a major, major difference between Windows and Linux updates: Ubuntu downloaded all updates in one go and installed the lot with no hassle; Windows downloaded and installed, rebooted, downloaded updates for the updates, rebooted again and… you get the picture.
Then the Ubuntu network died. Seriously, what the hell? It had been working flawlessly right up until the point where it decided not to, with no warnings, errors or anything. I reinstalled the whole OS hoping it would fix both this and the desktop resolution problem but to no avail, and I eventually went to bed at 2AM.
So this morning I hunt around the network config file and, on a hunch, delete the entry for my second ethernet adapter. I don’t have a Gigabit switch anyway so it’s kinda pointless. This brings the network back up instantly – Huzzah! I type ‘ubuntu resolution problem’ into Google and find a forum entry about configuring X from the terminal, run through the steps and – praise be! – my desktop is now in the correct resolution. I still have no idea why this should cease working just because I used SATA, however.
For a data drive I dug out a Win98 install CD and formatted the whole drive to FAT32. This part went suprisingly smoothly, althoug it was a pain waiting the best part of an hour for it to format. I went and had a shower… and read a book… and went out to post a letter as well. Zzz… I’m currently at the point where I am reformatting the drive using TrueCrypt to create an encrypted partition. It occurs to me that I probably could have done this in plaece of the FAT32 format but I’ve wasted enough time.
More posts later in the day, I imagine!
Dual Booting Ubuntu with Windows
January 28th, 2007Tested this and it all works fine. I had Ubuntu dual-booting with Win2k and decided to try it out with Vista RC2 as well. Got it working in the end but Jeebus, 10GB install for Vista Ultimate?
The machine creaks and groans it’s way to the desktop in well under 10 minutes and feels like a sloth on Valium while using it. This is because I only (only?) gave it a 10GB partition, mind. On a decent HD it boots just fine, but even so…
Still at it…
September 4th, 2006The weekend turned out busier than I had initially expected, what with the Red Bull Air Race on Saturday (cancelled due to bad weather – bah!) and a day out on Sunday. I didn’t really have time to get into the Reformat and Reinstall beyond getting Windows on there.
I spent a long time hunting round for the driver floppy that came with my mainboard because it contained the SATA RAID drivers. Couldn’t find the damned thing anywhere and then realised the drivers were probably on the CD anyway. They were, but I couldn’t read any floppies at all until I opened up the case and found there was no power cable to the floppy drive. Sigh.
I got the machine formatted and installed Windows but made the mistake of plugging in my USB 2.0 Card Reader. For some reason, it worked initially but eventually the USB driver subsystem just folded in on itself and the drives disappeared. I initially got a BSOD every time I restarted – something about the Driver IRQ and usb???.sys – but it keps disappearing before I thought to write it down. I tried reinstalling the mainboard USB drivers but, nope, no go.
So I’ve basically reinstalled Windows again. I eventually went to bed after 1am having got Windows installed and all the patches applied. I think I’ll plug the USB drive in as the very last thing and see if that helps – if it doesn’t I’m pretty much screwed.