Geek Practitioners Blog

Wow. I’d been meaning to post about other things, but now my main computer has died. Fascinating problem. Main problem being I’d rather not have to deal with it, and I can’t afford the cost of any replacement parts, or any parts or software required as a cascade effect.

The machine is a P4 3.2 GHz, 2 GB RAM, Intel D945GPM motherboard, running Windows Vista Ultimate. Yeah, I know. The last Windows I paid retail for before Vista was Windows Me. Guess you should all hope I don’t decide to buy a retail copy of Windows 8. Which is allegedly great, but looks silly to me. I built it, well, when Vista was the current release. Missed 7 by a couple years. Heck, has it really been that long? This would be like buying Windows 95 in 1996 and still running it in 2000. But seriously, never any problems with Vista, and that is not the issue here, apart from the inevitable requirement that it be “activated” or replaced.

The problem was the machine turned itself off, then would not turn on for more than a blip. Almost like an overheating problem. Or a power supply problem.

Fast forward to having troubleshot everything. I have a perfectly good power supply. I sure hope I have good hard drives, RAM and CPU. Looks like it’s the motherboard, but in a weird way.

The machine powers on if the 2×2 power cable is left unplugged. If it’s plugged in, over by the CPU where it’s supposed to go or the machine won’t turn on, the machine acts like it’s not plugged in. The power supply works correctly in an alternate environment. Resetting the CMOS and all that did no good.

It’s bizarre.

My preference would be for a direct, exact replacement, but D945GPM boards are unavailable. So at a minimum I need a board that will fit my CPU and RAM, will support SATA, and maybe all would go fine bringing it back up. I suspect I may really need a new hard drive, so the OS can start from scratch and all files on both existing drives will be accessible. Many but not all important ones are duplicated between the two drives in that machine, or are only on the secondary drive, added specifically to have room for files. Particularly pictures of the kids. Still, I’d rather not have to wipe the boot drive to get it back to reality.

The really unfortunate part is it’s the only computer in the house, or computer carcass, as most of them are, that uses SATA drives. I’d not thought of that as a problem with my backing up photos between drives on the same machine…. needing THAT MACHINE to read one of the drives. All our pictures before the last few months are also on another computer’s secondary drive. And that’s the other dead computer of the moment, with a bad boot drive that’s currently undergoing the most dire-looking chkdsk I have ever seen, while attached as a slave to a spare computer. That spare also has a backup of some of the pictures. What I really need is to make systematic use of a file server in the house, with appropriate redundancy/backup systems, and topped off with more systematic copying of selected pictures (and other important files, like taxes, which are on the motherboard-free computer and could be needed as we thrash out some issues) to cloud storage. Hey, I’d been thinking about it and tentatively planning! One of those things for when I had the money.

I am typing this on an old laptop someone gave me. It has XP Home and is functional. Or it was once I disabled as much as I could of Norton Security Suite. It’s one of those ones that came with no disks and if you need to restore, the OEM put all that in a special partition you can access at boot. Except… not. When I tried to do that, it prompted for the CD that came with the computer. Not. So it either stays the same, or it gets a new OS. If the latter, then it may become a Linux machine. Between that and a spare 1.6 GHz XP Pro machine that has almost no drive space (the one doing chkdsk on the rogue drive for hour after hour today), I kinda sorta can muddle through. It’s not fun, though. You get comfortable with the way things are. Indeed, the Vista box didn’t become my primary until my old Windows 2000 machine had problems I didn’t take the time to diagnose fully, but which probably meant hard drive failure.

In all this, I am paying for being a leading and ongoing economic indicator. I ran out of money in 2007, and some of it was smoke and mirrors before that. It’s gotten too little better, too slowly. What should be avocation to the point of vocation, spending on technology, is a huge luxury. It needs to change Real Soon Now. That I could believe in.

This blog has been in Page Rank penalty for quite a while, making me even less inclined to post or upgrade than I might otherwise have been. I couldn’t figure out what I might have linked to get it down and keep it down so long.

Yesterday I found myself looking at some of the actual posts, since I didn’t think even the obsolete blogroll links could be a problem. Just a few posts back was one that linked to an article about malware causing a false accusation of something heinous, and I named that heinous thing with the two words it is known by, a normally innocent one followed by “the P word,” as well as repeatedly using the P word itself in my post.

Could that be it? Seems like a reasonable possibility. So I edited each instance of the P word to be spelled with a number replacing a letter, in hopes that would be enough. I may also update WordPress and the theme, but I’ll be watching to see what happens even with the one little change. If it’s stubborn, I’ll kill the post, which should not be necessary. It’s a good post and a good point about security.

Stay tuned. If I succeed, maybe you’ll see more here. Or I may go ahead and start a new tech blog as I’d been thinking I must.

I upgraded to Firefox 4 yesterday when prompted, with mild trepidation, but excited about what I’d read of its ability to eliminate the need for things like Flash, using functionality native to HTML 5.

So far so good. I haven’t hated it enough to go back. It does seem to load pages faster, which is always a plus. It’s tough getting used to the interface changes, some of which may not be gratuitous. YMMV. I hate the gratuitous change of menu position for opening in new tab versus new window on the right-click of a link. My surfing is a rapid series of right-click then click on 2nd item in menu. Every time I forget it changed, many times a day, I get a new window and I get annoyed. That may be recognition of open in new tab as the new normal, but it handicapped me for the moment.

There are shortcuts otherwise, like Ctrl + and Ctrl -, or Ctrl and the scroll wheel on the mouse, but I hate my zoom toolbar button add-on being disabled. I never got used to having scroll mice and am as comfortable with the old style. Surfing is a mouse-driven activity and pausing to hit keyboard shortcuts is a discontinuity. Much as it’s a discontinuity to have software in which a lot of typing takes place and most things are done with keyboad commands, then have some vital function that needs to happen regularly and can only be done by stopping to grab the mouse.

I am not sure I see the point of condensing the toolbar or moving the tabs. It confuses me and slows me down every time I want to switch or close tabs, and it feels harder to tall at a glance which tab is active.

I don’t miss there being a status bar, and rather like the tooltip style display of URL at the lower left when hovering over a hyperlink. I’ve been told there are add-ons for changing elements of the UI back to the way they were, so if I have not become comfortable with one or another after a while, I could look into that. I suspect I’ll be fine, though.

No idea how it will run on a slower machine. This one has Vista, 3.2 GHz CPU and 2 GB RAM. We haven’t tried it on the 2.4 GHz XP machine that only has 512 MB RAM and, interestingly enough, gets bogged down beyond belief by Flash. Since it’s possible to revert, we should probably try it.

Via Warren Meyer, who in turn got it from Flowing Data, it’s a bubble sort demonstrated with Hungarian folk dance:

I went to my first computer show in 1992, almost 19 years ago. I used to go regularly, buying parts to build or fix my own machines, or ones for other people. It was the place to go. It was routinely mobbed.

With my own business, parts vendors, and limited need, I stopped going very often, and haven’t been to one… probably since 2003, come to think of it, maybe 2002. If they weren’t exactly the same then, they were still of interest.

I went to one today, since the local one, formerly one of the largest the show company held, was local. I was mainly curious to see what was new, what prices there were, and how it had changed.

It was sad to see what it has ground down to with time and internet. It took maybe a third the former space. There were as few as half a dozen actual vendors. Most of it was computers, mostly laptops, heavily Dells, at what generally seemed to be great prices for used/refurbished machines. If I’d had the kind of stray money I’ve had now and then, I might have come home with a machine or three. There was one that essentially matched or beat a machine I recently helped people with, similar to one of the two on my desk now, eighty bucks. I feel like I can toss most of the old machines that might have maybe been used by kids, or been parts for same, or for anyone who wanted to play legacy DOS games natively, because I can replace them and better for nothing.

Bottom line: If I decide I need a laptop but don’t care if it’s brand new, I’d go there and know I could get a buy on one. Ditto if I wanted a slightly (or much) older Apple machine, just to have used one and become more familiar.

It took me maybe 15 minutes to walk through and give it a good look. Since I was out of the house, alone – free!!! – I didn’t want simply to buzz home. Heck, I could have gone to a movie, come to think of it. I went to the supermarket I seldom visit because it’s not local. Got enough good buys to be happy.

Not sure what I’d do if I were running the show. Probably keep it going, if there were any money in it. Sounds familiar. It’d depress me, though. Sounds familiar.

It’s within the realm of the possible, and someday perhaps we’ll find out. I find that sort of thing intensely exciting.

I have a history of paying retail for versions of Windows that are later considered duds, whether I have issues with them or not. Well, if two in all can be called “a history.” I bought WinMe when it was current, and when I built this machine, I bought Windows Vista Ultimate. The machine with Me had no issues… until it died, no fault of Windows. Hardware.

This machine has also had no real problems. I could see room for improving the OS, but maybe not the excoriation of it that happened. But if that led the what seems to be an amazing outome in Windows 7, all to the good.

Anyway, I have twice recently needed to boot into safe mode.

Both of those times have left me in the Windows Classic appearance. Not that I’d modified things before the first time it happened. After the first time, my six year old daughter art-directed me to her liking. New wallpaper. New colors. Not bad, but wallpaper made seeing the desktop items harder.

It did it again. How hard is it to retain changes to the appearance of Windows? And not merely betweem version upgrades, but between boot variants on the same install!

Also, I have noticed that when you first bring up Personalization, the “window color and appearance” option takes you into an entirely different set of options that it does later, once it saves your initialy changes as a “modified theme.” Then to get back to some if not all of what you’d played with before requires choosing “Themes” instead.

Now I need to go change my changes, since I seem to have made text in BlogDesk harder to read…

Fear the merger? Don’t fear the merger? Mileage varies!

Maybe everybody loses and it’s unthinkable, or maybe the industry overall is so vibrant there’s no need to block it (which we all know has no bearing on whether or not it actually gets blocked).

Perhaps the carriers ought to work on the problem of cell reception worsening, focus on service offering innovations that seem cool, or concentrate on technological solutions to the expense and regulatory hurdles associated with building up capacity with traditional methods in the face of NIMBY. All NIMBY were the suburbanites, and ye cell users outraged…

I still don’t like it, despite seeing some business and regulatory logic to it. It ought to be an interesting next several weeks trying to figure out who will be least evil and most useful as I try to work out my own phone decisions.

As noted by voluntaryXchange, the preferred malware vector is now PDF files. Which is logical, given their ubiquity and the apparent vulnerability they make available.

I haven’t kept up on these things as much as I might have, since I fell out of being a computer geek for a living.