Jul 20 2008
Back again - Why do computers hate me?
I am back after 3 or 4 days of wrestling with computers.
My laptop where I write a lot of my posts has been a plague for a while, and got to the point where it was unusable.
The problem was that when I had some problems a while back, I fixed it by upgrading to Vista.
Now, let me state that I have two computers in my house, one a laptop, that run Vista flawlessly. I have no real beefs about the new Windows OS, except one feature I dislike, but that I can live with on my other computers.
The problem is, that my laptop is a bit older (3 years) and it was not designed to run Vista. So when I ran the upgrade adviser it passed, but only barely did it meet the requirements.
So in effect, I had to dumb Vista down immensely, and even then, it was slow and chunky.
Well, in returning it to Windows XP, where it ran fast and good, I ran into a problem, a kind of IT catch 22. Essentially, I found that I could not upgrade, obviously, and my first two attempts to do a parallel install left me with so much Vista legacy stuff on the hard drive that Windows XP was slightly unstable. The real problem was that without a Floppy drive, I had a hard time formatting the hard drive and reinstalling. You see, I could not use the Windows setup program to format the hard drive, as all of its temp install files were installed to the hard drive.
I needed an old school boot disk, a floppy with the utilities that I needed that could boot the computer independently. Normally a simple thing…when you have a floppy disk drive…which I didn’t.
Finally I had to make a bootable CD ROM that contained an image of a Windows 98 boot disk, making this in effect a Windows 98 boot cd. I also copied the core Windows XP files to that CD when I burned it.
This, I hoped, would give me the hard drive tools to wipe out all my old files, and the files to do a clean Windows XP install.
And….Success! All better, right?
No.
You see, the hardware and drivers for Laptops are really fussy and one of the drivers I was missing was the Wireless NIC it uses. Which means I could not access the Interweb and get the drivers for the the Fingerprint scanner, the video card, the regular NIC, the Modem, The sound device, the USB ports etc etc etc. I needed 29 different driver sets.
I got the driver for the wireless, burned it to a CD, and installed it. Then I installed and used an automatic driver upgrade utility supplied by IBM, and Presto: 6 hours later all my lap top drivers are updated and running smoothly.
Now you know why I charge 75 dollars an hour for freelance computer work. Except to friends and family of course…and amazingly, at that point, it seems like just about everyone is a friend or relative.
Anyway, just wanted to share that. Hopefully now that my system is stable, I can get back into the flow.
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10 Responses to “Back again - Why do computers hate me?”
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Quick tip: I’ve found that using a Puppy Linux bootable CD or USB drive in cases like that do be a blessing. Puppy runs entirely in memory, so it’s fast and unlike other “Live” CDs, one can remove the CD from the drive and burn away to ones heart’s content.
Not that burning downloaded drivers is necessary, cos with a Puppy session running, one also has full access to Windows drives.
Oh, and I’ve had great success with Puppy Linux recognizing a wide array of wireless cards and joining wireless networks. It’s not a panacea, but in cases such as you describe, it can be a nearly indispensable tool.
http://puppylinux.org/
Give it a shot. Heck, I have one (infrequently used, granted) box that always boots Puppy from one of the CD drives. Makes a great spare box for visitors, cos it’s like running everything sandboxed. If they do something to screw up the saved session (yeh, you can install apps and everything, and save the session so Puppy boots right back to wherever you were), I can just restore a backed up session from a flash drive.
And it’s a great box to try stuff out on that I don’t want to do on a “mission critical” box. On top of that, it’s an OLD (2000) 800Mhz, 512MiB box with a less-old 80GiB hard drive that’s not really good for much else, but runs like a Ferrari with Puppy’s light weight Linux.
Go ahead and burn a Puppy ISO to a CD and give it a shot. It might become a regular in your toolbox as it is in mine.
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Really? According to these figures from the end of May, Obama had raised a total of $287,397,945 vs John McCain’s $119,594,596. Kristi Jourdan, of The Grand Rapids Press, may want to actually research such sources prior to publishing nons…
I am afraid to say this, but fortunately I’ve only needed to restore once. The only problem was, the 7 disks they gave me when I bought my computer back in Jan. 02 was missing some of its info. (Time and dust, ya know. I thought I had it protected, but…) I now have to go around the main drive into this test drive. It works very well.
BTW, I hate vista! I got it, and then I demanded they take it out. They did. My computer does run a little slower though. Hmm. Did they take everything out? Um…the way I demanded it? I have no idea! lol.
It’s very good to have you back, Karl. Keep putting out these great articles!
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Podcast Show Notes
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Podcast Show Notes
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