Category: My Computer

A shame I didn’t spot these free Christmas fonts before I did up all our various Christmas documents.

Or, maybe just as well.

(Posted by CronDave, story via J-Walk)

Back on the T40. Backed up all my data from the A31, then restored all the Documents & Settings directories to the T40. Everything’s here except RoboForm, I think (and I’ll rectify that in a bit), but MS Office is griping about license reinstallation. Rrg.

Very busy rest of the morning. I really don’t have time to deal with that.

UPDATE: Seems I shall have to deal with it, since I can’t frelling create or reply to Outlook mail, nor save Word docs at the moment. Rrrrrg.

… thank Hampton Inn and ViewSonic I’m online at last!

Whew.

Just heard back from the happy-peppy offsite computer repair folks.

The good news is that, yes, they confirm there’s something wrong with the display on my machine, with its intermittent pink-and-or-cyan ghosting and flickering on and off at odd moments.

The bad news is that, no, they can’t really do anything about it there. IBM will only ship them one, two at the most, replacement warranty parts at a time. They’ve identified at least three things that are (or may be) behind the problems — the LCD, the ribbon cable, and something else the customer service manager couldn’t remember.

So their recommendation is that it needs to be sent back to IBM for depot service. Which is easily a 2-4 week turn-around process.

(That loud, rhythmic thudding you hear is my head pounding on my nice wooden desk.)

Given Thanksgiving, then my Atlanta trip early next week, I can’t send it off now. A week and a half after that, we’re off to Orlando, then California (working holiday vacation).

So I could send it off for repairs after Atlanta, relying on the holidays to minimize my need to use it. Least painful course, perhaps, while I use a loaner notebook. Safer, perhaps, than waiting to see if the thing crashes and burns and dies a horrible death while I’m away in another state. And, on the bright side, it makes for a lighter briefcase whilst traveling. Of course, last thing I need is something else interesting to do in the week before we leave.

But I so do not want to go through migrating between machines again. Words cannot begin to describe. Unfortunately, it sounds inevitable. I just feel like the guy whose house is being remodelled in one, long, constantly-inconvenient nightmare scenario …

Rrg. And, again, rrg.

UPDATE: And imagine my joy, my sheer giddiness, when I picked up my computer, brought it home, powered it up — and no display came up.

Many unprintable words later, and three calls to the repair shop, and a trip down there, I have it back. But clearly I need to get the frelling thing fixed ASAP. I still plan on taking it on my Atlanta trip, but I’ll be sweating little bullets along the way.

My ThinkPad is in the shop for (scheduled) warranty repair service on its screen — which has been frequently shifting into a wonderland of pink and cyan ghosts and streaks, as well as occasionally just going black. Display problem or ribbon cable problem, almost certainly. Dropped it off at the shop last evening, should have it back tomorrow afternoon.

Meantime, I’m back on the ThinkPad T40 which I was using earlier. Mercifully it still has FireFox still installed on it; less so, I removed all the cached history, links, RoboForm stuff, etc. Some bits are still present, but it’s pretty close to running on a stripped-down machine, whereas I am totally spoiled by the highly-customized computing environment I normally play in.

Oh, yeah, and back to the teeny-tiny 640×480 desktop. Bleah.

Hopefully the repairs will work. Even more hopefully, they’ll have them done before Monday, when I head off for another trip.

UPDATE: Well, it’s not quite so bad as that. Outlook syncs to this machine okay, I’ve been able to get Sync2It working (sorta), too, and a couple of other things. No Jaeger, alas (I haven’t been backing my Jaeger DB to a network drive), no Thunderbird, and a few other files not accessible, but not quite so much woe-is-me, just sort of some annoying irks that won’t make the next couple of days any easier.

Chunky or smooth? Ginger or Mary Ann? Loose end of the toilet paper over the front or down the back?

Now, add to that, this profound question: How do you sort your e-mail? Do new messages show up at the top of your inbox screen, with older messages trailing down below? Or do they show up at the bottom, with older message trailing upwards?

Take the poll!

Oh, and leave a comment, if you want to explain further.

(Posted by CronDave)

Not sure when I’m going to upgrade to the full-blown huzzah! v1.0 of Firefox, but I give it about 50% chance of happening before I head out on my trip. (My 1.0 Preview Release version is stable enough at the moment, and I’ve got plenty to do before then.)

But for all the rest of you, g’head. The thing’s been beta-tested pretty brutally, and while any browser out there is going to have kinks, I’ve been pretty darned pleased with Firefox (vs IE).

Note to self: Also need to upgrade to Thunderbird 0.9.

The difference between 256Mb of RAM running under WinXP, and 768Mb of RAM running under WinXP, is the difference between … well, between a something really slow and clumsy and frustrating and lockup-prone, and something that actually performs like I expect it to.

It’s not a new lesson, but it’s one worth mentioning again.

My RSS (etc.) aggregator, BlogMatrix Jäger, has issued a new release, which includes the much-clamored-for features of Podcast reception and synchronization with Bloglines. Well, no, I hadn’t clamored for either of those, but, what the heck.

I’ve more or less gotten moved back into the Thinkpad A31.

Pros: A significantly bigger screen (and higher resolution sizes). A 50% larger hard drive. A much nicer keyboard.

Cons: The T40 had a slightly faster processor. More importantly, it had 512Mb instead of 256Mb — which flaw I am in the process of correcting. Uncorrectable is that the T40 had USB2 ports, while the A31 has only USB1, which makes backups a loooooooot slower.

Still, when all is said and done, I’m happy. I still have to do a lot of restoring, but I’m “back where I belong.” As long as the system doesn’t crash aga … CARRIER LOST

The PC tech has gotten my old PC (the ThinkPad A31p) up and running again with the replacement drive and the more recent data, and has handed it back to me.

Of course, it’s also got a 3-week-or-so-old image of my data files, etc., so I need to

1. Back up the temp PC (the ThinkPad T40).
2. Note what program changes I’ve made in the interim.
3. Restore the updated data to the A31.
4. Update the program files to any changes since then (that may be done before the previous step in some cases. Firefox comes to mind.) (MozBackup?)
5. Do yet another backup of the A31p — not into the original backup I made of it.
6. Hand back the T40 as a backup in case the A31p stops working.
7. Reinstall the programs I didn’t restore after the A31p died (iTunes comes to mind).
8. Restore the data files I didn’t to the T40 (import mp3s for iTunes come to mind).
9. Do another backup of the A31p.
10. Return to life as “usual.”

And, in all of the above, hope that programs don’t break and that I don’t inadvertently restore an Old Version over a New Version.

Still, it will be nice to have my old PC back, even if it weighs about twice as much. 🙂

Anyone have any idea why some of my Firefox extensions are coming up in German? Not all of them, but a couple — ChromEdit, the Tabbrowser Preferences items in the Options screen, downTHEMall’s execution screen, etc. Just showed up in German on install. Everything else is nicely rendered in English.

Annoying.

I mistrust technology trend estimates, because they are so often off-course and driven by the pundit’s desires and the need to be on the Next Big Thing. (I feel the same way about political polls, for analogous reasons. But I digress.) That said, I keep reading more and more articles like this about how Micro$oft is in big trouble with IE, and how Firefox (as an example and in particular) is picking up its defectors. And not just in “Mozilla Gazzette” or “Microsoft Haters Journal,” but in mainstream trades.

So what does this mean for the majority of Windows users, who aren’t even on Windows XP? Microsoft officials have said these users must upgrade to Windows XP Service Pack 2 to gain the new security and capability improvements in IE.

I think Microsoft has it at least partially right. A lot of users will decide they want improved features and increased security in their Web browser, and they will decide to upgrade — but not to Windows XP SP 2.

We’ve already seen the beginning trickle of users moving away from IE: For the first time in years, IE’s market share has dropped slightly. But I predict that this trickle will soon become a full-fledged torrent. In fact, I fully expect that, a year from now, IE’s market share will be below 75 percent. (Check me on that in October 2005.) And that’s being conservative because this would be a smaller drop than the Netscape browser ever took once it began to lose share. (And Netscape the company never did anything as stupid as telling users they could get new features only by using one operating system.)

More important, the writer gives some anecdotal evidence that this is not just geeks preaching to geeks, but that the word about Firefox and other browsers is leaching out to mainstream users.

Should be interesting to see what happens. I’ll know it’s arrived when my folks ask to have it installed on their PC …

(via adot)

Amazon.com actually seems to have decent (if still exorbitant) printer toner prices. And if you buy a couple of cartridges, you’ve almost certainly dropped enough to qualify for free shipping. Sure, there’s a delay, but balance that against sales tax. And if you have a “discontinued model,” it’s a lot easier to find toner online than at the local OfficeMaxpot.

As noted before, Spellbound still rocks as a spell checker for Firefox. Except for its checking of HTML tags. And the fact that “Firefox” is not in its baseline English dictionary. Aside from that, it rocks (and beats not having one). Now reinstalled and ready to rock, er, spell.

I updated to the 1.0 Pre-Release of Firefox last week. A couple of random thoughts:

1. I decided on a fresh profile rather than installing it on top of the old system. The FF docs say you can do that, but a couple of other sites recommended against it.
2. RoboForm is updated to be able to support FF 1.0PR. Most of the other major extensions I use are, too.
3. It was a good opportunity to reload the current versions of just some of the extensions I was using, getting rid of ones that I don’t need or didn’t use.
4. The system seems a bit less stable, though. More frequent crashes (not a lot, but any are too many).
5. My MT-it bookmarklet no longer works (though it did in 0.9.3). Not sure why. I can’t find anything in Google about it, so it may be something else odd going on with my system, not with FF in general.

When the 1.0PR was released, the FF folks were pushing for a million downloads in the first ten days.

They ended up with two million.

Good job.