#10 What goes around...

Ok, so I may not be the best at celebrating the glories of old technology on this blog, as originally hoped, but I think you might like this one. I am writing this blog from my workplace, a secure cocoon of connectivity. There is no internet here. At least not that work lets me write blogs from... I am writing this post through a blutooth link to my cell phone (so it has to be quick, I have a 10MB limit).

What grinds my gears is that when I first started using this machine I had the Sony-Ericsson PC suite providing my internet connectivity. Today, it decided not to work. Now, I use the S-E PCS to connect the phone via bluetooth, then use the latest version of Vodafone mobile broadband to connect to the net. This is annoying. Why can the software that is made by the phone manufacturer not work and the software made by a giant multinational company works... well to be honest very well? Even through bluetooth (which if I am not mistaken, has been problematic for windows computers for a long, long time...)?

Ok, rant over. Now back to some good old tech success. I have recently resuscitated my iPaq rz series PDA. This has no connectivity other than USB (1.1!) and is essentially a music player with pocket office on it. So I now need to convert all my digital movies to windows media files and I will be able to watch them in 3.5" glory. Yeah right. Being made to hand back my blackberry at work though has prompted me to have a stab at it and to be honest, it's not too bad. I have to be careful about sync settings but the new Windows Mobile Center is actually good at managing the connection, making sure no duplicates are made and that the most recent version of each contact is synced to both devices etc. What it doesn't do, however, is sync media - indeed Windows Media Player cannot even recognise that there is a device connected. Oh dear.

So, next step is creating a master contacts list that can be reliably synced between PDA, PC, Gmail, and work. All using physical connections, not auto sync allowed! (I like to challenge myself...)

#9 Windows7 again (I'll stop going on about it soon I promise)

Ok, I know I don't update this very frequently, but let's face it, I don't have a massive readership anyway, so I don't think I'm disappointing anyone there really. But what I do find disappointing is the fact that I started attempting to install Windows 7 in April, and now, in June, it is working.

The installation process was identical to the RC. I followed my own instructions to install drivers etc, and I have to say that my original impressions based on the release candidate are ... identical to my initial impressions of the SP1 release. That has to be testament to the programmers at MS - they actually released a good product at sp1, but better than that, it was good before release, and they must have had to change very little.

After minimal frustration I was up an running with 7 on my HP TC1100. I even got access to my Apple Time Capsule disk from within windows, something I had previously been unable to do on any windows machine (contact the person who administers your network, fuck you I am the admin.). Greedily, I tried to combat the one remaining limitation that TC1100 users struggle with world-wide, the bios limitation that prevents Windows from using anything past 128gb of HD space.

This problem is old and as the TC1100 is also old, it suffers from this problem. What it means is that if your OS refers to a sector on the disk that is further than 137,000,000 kB from the boot sector, it reads the disk starting again from zero, and so fucks your shit up big time. Long story short, you MUST partition your HDD to a maximum size of 125GB before you install an OS or else the thing will shit the bed after you have been using it for a while. My problem was, I thought that having a 250gb HDD and only using 125GB of it was not acceptable (the officer of the watch shall not tolerate defects) and read somewhere that I could get around it by partitioning and formatting the other half of the drive using G-Parted, or Mac OSX or whatever.

Then the fun started. Yes, you can partition leaving the first part untouched. But it seems the TC100 won't boot if there is a partition affter the 137KKKB sector, so it shit the bed anyway and I couldn't boot into windows, not even safe mode. No worries, I thought. I'll just make an image of the partion and re-burn it after re-formatting.

Occaisionally in life you have these moments when you realise you have just done something really really dumb. Like COLOSOLLY dumb. Like, pick up an baking tray without an oven mit because the baking looks like it might burn if you leave it in there another second, dumb. Like, realising you should not have attempted that jump as you fall over the handle bars of your bike and land on your face, dumb.

As I clicked [Yes, I am sure I want to delete this partition] I realised that this was one of those moments.

Here are a few reasons why this was epically dumb:

1. I could have just deleted the new partition, leaving this old one untouched.
2. If you make an image in Mac OSX, you need to write it with the same,
3. Mac OSX cannot write to NTFS.
4. It was not broken, so why the fuck was I trying to fix it in the first place?

Anyway, having done this epically dumb thing, I went about trying different was of making Windows try to recognise the full size of the disk. and short of implanting a special kind of boot-kit from Western Digital, I realised it was useless. I gave in, reformatted, after nearly breaking the bus pins on the HDD because it had been taken out and re-installed so many times, and reinstalled windows.

I should add at this point that my copy of Win 7 is upgrade only, so you must install a previous version on Windows first before it will work. For me this meant installing XP Tablet edition with its thousand extra little packs and add-ons and generally taking about 4 hours to instal. Install AVG, install the ethernet driver, and then install windows 7 including downloading updates. Then another 4 hours to install Windows 7, install updates, AV, Office, etc etc etc. Each time (I did this three times) I would have to spread the process out over several days as I was working such long hours I could not attend my poor wee tablet during the process.

After realising that it wasn't going to work I went back to the way it was originally, nearly a month later by this stage, and now I am back where I started, except it's not connected to the Time Capsule disk, and I have for some very strange reason, decided that I will use every piece of MS software I can, AV, ie8, if it doesn't actually cost me anything, I am using it. And to be honest, I don't mind it too much.

So I will say it again, though I still consider myself a Mac user, I do like Windows 7. It is fast, good looking, easy to use, and when you are connected to the net its features like driver updates work really, really well. I have not had to scrounge an old cd to install drivers, not even for my weather station's usb>serial converter.

Nothing.

It all just works.

Now if I can just get the BIOS to recognise the full size of the disk...

FLASH - Windows 7 Genuine

1. I ACTUALLY PAID MONEY FOR WINDOWS.
2. IT WORKS.
3. MORE TO FOLLOW.

#8 I sold out.

Well well well, what do you know? Latest version of Ubuntu = win, latest version on Windows = fail.

Installing Ubuntu was exceptionally easy thanks to the ever-present Live CD. Start up from the CD first, confirm all systems are go, then click, 'install to disk'. Why, why, why, can windows not do that? I could have saved myself a shite load of bother in the first place!

Ubuntu is cool although I did have a little issue with the GRand Universal Boot loader, the little worm decided my HDD didn't exist, even though the GRUB is stored there. Oh well, that is par for the course with open source I suppose. The great thing is, even though it has only been out for 2 weeks or somethin ridiculous, there are already others out there who have even less of a life than me, and even more old rotting hardware to play around with, who have already encountered, 'forumed', received advice about, tested and found solutions for, the same problems I encountered. So really, there are no problems, just temporary annoyances...
So, long story short, Linux is cool, it has given my 7-year old hardware a new lease on life, it now runs a brand new OS, rather than one that is 7 years old! There's more to come here, as I get into Linux I will endeavour to push the boundaries to re-format inducing levels, and see what kind of trouble me and my new best friend 'sudo' can get into together! (sudo make me a coffee!)
That is not what I am most excited about however. What I am most excited about is my purty little Tabatha! Windows 7 continues to run very well on this ancient platform. So well that I have made it my official "best old tech"machine. I made it official with a quaint tea-drinking and RAM-upgrading ceremony, where I transplanted the symbol of 'best old tech" soverignty, my 1GB, 333MHz RAM stick from Maja the Laptop to Tabatha the Tablet. And then drank some tea.

As a quick aside, I now think both machines run better, possibly due to the fact that both now have same-speed RAM in both slots? If anyone knows if that's realistic I'd be interested to find out.

Anyway, back to Tabatha, I have tested pretty much every program I want to run from it (except Diablo II, watch this space) and have been satisfied entirely. The only gripe I really have is that my HDD isn't big enough.

But wait, I thought, I have a 250GB drive sitting in my Laptop, largely empty as it has a fresh install on Ubuntu on it, couldn't I stick that in the Tablet?

No, it is old, and BIOS will only address the first 137GB of the disk. A quick google search later confirmed that that's not a problem as long as you have 2 partitions, the first of which has to be less than 137GB. Sweeeeet. This has pretty much made my mind up for me. I am going to buy Windows 7, and install it on a very, very old computer... Again.

So the largely free & open Source project has completely about-turned. Perhaps, since lappy is now running Ubuntu I could try out that as an open-source platform. And, as I've now spent $75 on a DVD Drive for Tabatha, & the RAM I put in cost $100 not 3 months ago, you can't really say it's free any more, can you?

Next Step: Installing office 2OO7: Wish me luck.

#7 The grass is not greener, you're colour-blind.

So, I have a new pinch of salt to add to my praise of Windows 7.

To start from somewhere after the start, I recently tried to install W7 in a dual boot scenario on my HP Compaq nx7000 and got a winload.exe failure after reboot. A quick google showed many people have reported the same error trying to dual boot vista on my machine.

Step back a little way, before I attempted this, indeed before Windows 7 even came out, I ran the compatibility checker. The only significant thing it told me was my WLAN driver would need to be downloaded separately, and that Aero etc wouldn't work. The thing came out in 2004, no surprises there!

So I booted back into xp and copied off my files, then used GParted to format the drive. Fingers crossed at this stage cos I just wiped my HDD hoping that the reason I couldn't continue with set up was the dual boot thing.

Turns out I was right, and set up continues with only W7 installed… But, and this is a big 'but', it turns out, W7 is not compatible with my Machine's graphics or WLAN card. Sweet as, I don't need better res than 700x560, and who needs wireless these days, the internet is overrated…

So I spent about a day looking on the net for different drivers, I even emailed HP, who kindly sent me an email back, stating my machine is not compatible with W7. Oarsome. Thanks a bunch Windows Compatibility Checker, you wouldn't know if Windows was compatible with yo' momma's left titty.

After trying everything I could think of, I decided the best course of action was to install GNU/Linux. So I chose Ubuntu Karmic Koala (and yes, before you ask, when I the time comes, I will probably install Lesbian Llama).

I'll update you on how the ubuntu install goes soon. In the meantime, here's a list of things I've learned up to today:

• Sometimes, even when you are confident you know what you are doing, you don't.
• Emo kids with bright orange hair who mutter 'Death' under their breath as you walk past them are infinitely less preferable to the ones who busk outside the supermarket singing, 'I don't know what I'm doing wrong' songs (am I a bad person because the first thing I thought to do was tell him to cut down the wrist, and not across it?)
• Commander Sulu has a really, really cool voice: "Actually it's my first attempt."
• In order to re-crystalise the lithium in my laptop battery I just need to steal some photons from a nuclear reactor, preferably from the US(N)S Enterprise.