Category: Computing

It appears that my finger waving at the Abit motherboard was somewhat wrong. Well, possibly. Now we’ve got “spontaneous reboot syndrome”. I’m wondering if the powersupply is toast (again); it does smell faintly of old over hot component but I’m not 100% convinced it’s the cause of the problem. However, if I apply load to it, the system does appear to reboot. It is, however, frustrating. I don’t know if it’s the cause or not.

Hopefully I can find the recipt, but probably not. I shall try and take it back today though. Also frustratingly I wanted to put OS X on the machine, but have the wrong install disk.

After 2 years, I think it is, my site layout for pyoor.org is beginning to look a little… well, it’s fine, but I’m slightly bored of it. I really liked the layout – especially compared to the one prior – it just looked so clean and simple. But now I want to fiddle, but I’ve not yet had any grand ideas for the redesign.

Although things may take a while, watch this space for exciting Kate shaped developments.

So, I’m now accepting suggestions for operating systems for my Dell Laptop. It’s a 450ish Mhz CPiA laptop with (quite a lot) of memory (256Meg?). I’ve tried Ubuntu. Ubuntu:

– Out of the ‘box’ it failed to boot twice
– Fails to work with my network card (I’ve tried everything they suggest, with the exception of installing Raconfig, which wouldn’t build. I’ve installed RuTilt which is the other suggestion, which informs me it can’t get the Tx rate and then does nothing else).
– Has updated software on it and now won’t load at all
– Is therefore not likely to win any awards from me

I was thinking about Gentoo, but I think my machine may not be high enough spec for Gentoo. And I’m not sure I have the patience. With one unreliable pc, and one no-working-install laptop I’m kinda keen to get a working machine pretty quickly. Although it goes against my better nature, I’m currently downloading Redhat / Fedora 6. I am really keen not to end up back with Windows, I was moderately impressed by Ubuntu’s picking up and running with the windows network, but the fact it’s stone cold dead now, that doesn’t impress me.

So, we shall see. Anyone any other suggestions?

I used to use linux. I used to. I used to love it. I loved it and cuddled it and it sat on my PC being stable, effective, good. All was good. Except for one teeny tiny little thing. Installing software was like pulling teeth. Normally, being as I was a SuSE user, the software would be available as a package – but only for RedHat. Sometimes, nuts as I was I’d install these. They’d not work.

So then I got quite good at building from source, but the process appeared to be one designed by someone with a somewhat masochistic trait. Applications would invariably require a huge list of unspecified dependancies which could only be found by building the application and waiting for the build to fail – at which point you’d track down what it had not checked it needed but actually did need, and then you’d enter some sort of mandlebrotian fractal process in which you would repeat the process of attempting to install the stuff it depended on… which needed you install stuff it depended on… which needed you to install stuff it depended on…

You get the picture?

But for the most part – since I never turned my PC off and so never had to endure the week-long boot time I was happy with Linux. Being as I’m not a complete idiot it remained virus free and because I was reasonably with it and kept updates up it remained obvious-route-of-external-attack free.

But the move to university eventually forced me to give up my linuxoid ways – the university providing some stuff in Word documents that were so hideously munged that StarOffice / OpenOffice just couldn’t render them in any meaningful way. So with some substantial difficulty, and much cursing, I switched to Windows 2000, and thence to Windows XP. Don’t think for a second it was easy. It took days. Transfering data from Ext3 do NTFS is not a job which is fun. The machine had to be reinstalled afterwards, the Ext3 driver having caused much chaos – at least apparently.

But I have now reached that painful stage of fed up with Windows again. Windows has died a death on one machine and on my laptop, well, it’s the now unsupported 98 which has never remained happy for more than a few minutes anyway. And so I find myself considering Linux. I was thinking about OSX on PC, but… well. I dunno. Maybe. On the desktop. But this laptop with it’s PIII / 500 processor isn’t really up to that. I’ve got as far as downloading Ubuntu and burning it. And suddenly had the urge to look at WINE again, and pondered the possibility of xmplay and Premier Pro on linux – which are the only applications I’ll *really* miss (to be fair, IO only really use applications that are multiplatform anyway). Well that and possibly Fwink. Clearly I am some kind of masochist.

My machine is now spontaneously BSODing with a frequency somewhat higher than I’d like. In fact, it’s safe to say that I’m rather nervous about leaving it on, or indeed starting it up. I thought earlier today I might get away with the whole ‘leave it until after my essays are submitted’ but it’s becoming rather rapidly apparent that that isn’t going to do. At all.

I will probably attempt to leave it, but by a process of using my laptop for work. Or something. I dunno. It’s three weeks. I can survive with reduced internet usage for three weeks can’t I?

It’d help if there was some actual obvious reason for the failures; I’ve just reverted to the ‘last known good configuration’ (whatever that was), but the reasons for the BSOD’s I’ve seen have been fairly varied – and then there’s the non BSOD-just stopped’s which are also pretty alarming. The whole thing just says ‘not good’ to me in big Pink Neon letters, flashing on and of with a disturbing frequency that makes me want to reinstall *now*.

If I didn’t have quite so much work on I would.

So, I came out this morning and plonked down at the PC to check my mail (yes, I am that sad, okay?); and it was sat at the log in prompt. Not unusual in itself, since this machine has multiple logins then it quite often sits at the log in prompt; but what was unusal was that when I logged in it was clear it’d rebooted.

There having been a huge storm last night I vaguely assumed that the machine had rebooted after a brief poweroutage. But I just came up now and it locked up instead of logging in.

I guess the reinstall is approaching quicker’n I might like.

In other news, I think I’ve hosed the battery Lauren put in my Laptop – I’d forgotten that she put it in there, and didn’t bother to charge the damn thing. It looks like it might give – at best, an hour, of battery life. I’m guessing that the 3800mAh battery should last longer than that. Fiddlesticks. That’s what I say. I dunno. Anyone know what expected battery life on a Dell CPi laptop is?

This link is… my life.

I awoke this morning and found that my PC had reset during the night. I configured this machine for ‘automatic updates’ such that it’d download them and tell me about them, but one of the updates appears to have made it decide that it wants to download and install the bloody things. grrr. It’s also turned on the Windows Firewall – again. I’m beginning to want to beat that with sticks. We’ve got a proper firewall here, we don’t need no steenking firewall.

*sigh*

I guess it’s time to set too and finish my work. I am wholeheartedly sick of it though. Yes. Never mind.

So, I went to John Lewis’ and bought a new keyboard. It’s the first time in my life I’ve actually paid for a decent keyboard which is odd. We’ll see how it goes. I feel kind of sad to no longer be using my RM AT keyboard (circa about 1990). It’s also thrown up how wrong the height of this desk is for me. Also, I bought the wrong one; having examined about twenty boxes to find the right one and the price of it (it turned out they have 5 different, but very similar sorts of keyboard there) I then promptly picked up the wrong one and bought it, drove home, started to unpack it and went “Oh bollocks” then drove back and had to swap it for a vastly more expensive one.

Never mind, it does feel more comfortable. Although it also shows up the age of everything else; the non-matching beige/off whites of the rest of the components. Never mind so.

So, my computer’s been a bit ‘off’; a while back when I installed the SnapScan 1212 drivers it started to behave oddly; crashing periodically (as in kernel-fault, bluescreen of death, instant reset crashing); particularly after burning AudioCDs. But otherwise it seemed to be okay.

But today, just as I was about to head out it did it for no apparent reason. BANG SPLUTCH REBOOT. It went. But I just hit the power off button, ‘cos I was going out anyway.

And then… I came home… and found that: my machine wouldn’t boot; Windows setup informed me that my main hard disk (that one with all my uni work on) was not formated, was formated in some format it couldn’t read, or hopelessly corrupt. Finally, getting the W2k3 machine up here (at around 11pm) and finding a monitor that would talk to the graphics card (my 21″ monitor decided to report NO SIGNAL for all 3 cards) and getting the disk plugged in as a second harddisk (along with one of the old 40 Gig drives) produced a scandisk complete with badsectors. So I’ve managed to copy, I think, all the work and mail off it. And now I’m into reinstalling windows on the 40Gig drive. In a bit I’ll check if the Maxtor is under warranty.

Bollocks.

:-/