Dramatic Reenactments

 Complaining, Computer Stuff, General, Internet  No Responses »
May 032012
 
Exploding Computer

This is why I hardly ever blog these days.  Besides teaching my dog how to count, I am doing Important Things, like working on my dissertation.  This is tough stuff, as it requires me to focus on something, sometimes for hours or minutes at a time.  This is what it looks like.  Note that the me in the reenactment is way better looking than I am, but they always do that in dramatically reenacted TV shows.  In real life I am quite ugly.

This is me fixing a computer.  What happens is that someone will say, “Hey, my computer is broken.  Fix it?”  So I will say, “Sure, no problem!  I can totally do that.”  Then it explodes, and I get shards of technology embedded in my skin.  To absolve myself from shame, I will tell  them that whatever they did gave the computer a terrible virus that rendered it useless, and they should be more careful in the future.

This is what I do for the rest of the time.

Mini-me

 Computer Stuff, General  1 Response »
Aug 172010
 

So what do you do when you feel the overwhelming desire to be totally connected to the internet at every conceivable point in time? “Why, get a smartphone, of course. Duh.” may be the most accurate response. But there may be some occasions where a smartphone isn’t really up to the task. Just don’t tell my Droid I said that, because I’m beginning to suspect it is self-aware.

A netbook is the perfect in-between device between a smartphone and a regular laptop. Its main appeal is that it is tiny. You can even fit it into a purse if you have one of those extra-large, kids-no-longer-in-diapers-but-you-still-need-to-tote-a-lot-of-stuff-around, not-a-diaper-bag bags. Or a diaper bag.

Netbooks can run full operating systems like Windows XP or Windows 7 (most of them cannot run Vista, but who really cares anyway? Vista is Microsoft’s version of Cousin Oliver). Or even Ubuntu, if you want to walk on the wild side.

On a netbook you can do almost anything you would do on a standard sized PC.  I say almost because if you are into World of Warcraft you’ll probably be out of luck.  Any graphics-intensive game would be better suited elsewhere, but if you really dig Farmville on Facebook you should be okay.  Netbooks typically don’t have optical CD or DVD drives either, which is why they can be so small.

I have a Dell Mini 10v myself, and it’s been handy for keeping in front of the TV for when my husband is bogarting the TV with his 1000th episode of How It’s Made, or when my kids are in their drama class at the Y and I am too lazy to exercise, or when Comcast internet fails yet again and I have to go to the Wegman’s to use their free WiFi to get my work done by the deadline, or when I leave the country.

A netbook is also a good deal if you want to get your kid a computer but you don’t want to spend a lot of money on it knowing that it would be one cup of milk and a screwdriver away from doom.    Dell even makes a green slime version of the Mini if you would be so inclined.

Tale of Woe

 Computer Stuff, General  No Responses »
Aug 112010
 

Once upon a time there was this girl named Princess Fluffypants* who had a bunch of computers attached to a wireless network.  She thought it would be groovy to have a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device/dragon upon which she could throw all of her pictures.  So every time she took a picture of her kids, she would feed it to the dragon to hold, and then ask the dragon to show it to her no matter what computer she happened to be on.

But alas, one day she thought, hey, what am I doing?  I shouldn’t put all my pictures in one dragon.  That seems risky.  So she got the dragon a mate, paired them together, and the dragon promptly decided it hated the new dragon, and ate all the pictures before they could be replicated.

Princess Fluffypants cried a bajillion tears. Then she took the NASty dragon to a computer guy, who for $200 retrieved some, but not all of her beloved pictures. Unable to face the heartache of a photo like this:

"Woe is me!"

… being gone forever, Princess Fluffypants locked the rebellious dragon away and tried to forget his betrayal.  Until one day, months later, she woke up, ripped the dragon open and removed his internal organs, attached them directly to the motherboard of Old Faithful (her trusty elderly desktop), downloaded DiskInternals Uneraser, paid the forty bucks, let it run for eight hours, and all of the glorious photos were returned good as new.

There was much rejoicing, and Princess Fluffypants learned a valuable lesson about never trusting dragons who don’t play well with others.

*not an actual princess

On Chick-Fil-A, Ubuntu, and Dust Bunnies

 Computer Stuff, General  4 Responses »
Aug 052010
 

This morning I was driving home from dropping my son off and I suddenly really REALLY wanted one of those breakfast chicken biscuits from Chick-Fil-A with the accompanying salteriffic hash browns and some of their unsweetened tea.  And the guy in front of me on the road was doing 10 miles below the speed limit.  What does this have to do with anything, you may ask?  Well, nothing, really, other than I had a lot of time to think.

So I got to thinking about my recent foray into the world of Ubuntu.  Huh?  Well, Ubuntu is an operating system – a variety of Linux to be precise – which can do pretty much most of the stuff that Windows can do but without a lot of the problems that Windows has.  The best part is that it is free, although I do feel less guilty about giving Mr. Gates money now that he’s trying to rid the world of mosquitoes.  Anyway, Ubuntu (and Linux) is open source software.  Open source is kind of like the collective consciousness, if only nerds were allowed to participate.  So it’s constantly being improved and perfected by nerds working for the greater good of all humanity, although as of yet there is no open source software that can rid the world of mosquitoes.

The computer upon which I installed Ubuntu actually belongs to my friend.  About a year ago she gave me her laptop to fix, and like any good friend, I looked at it, realized it didn’t work, and stuck it under my desk for a year.  Then a couple of days ago I had to move something and remembered it was there, so I took it out to see if it would miraculously work after such a long vacation.  The Geek Squad had reported the hard drive to be dead, but I found this was not the case once Windows was removed and Ubuntu was installed.

Here is the part where I will briefly mention how I had tried to install Ubuntu on an ancient Dell desktop for months, but was never able to get it to work.  So imagine my delight when this installation went flawlessly, and it was up and running in under an hour.

But then there was trouble.  The wireless card didn’t want to work properly.  And, perhaps more importantly, the laptop smelled as though it was going to burst into flames at any moment.  Google being my friend, I looked up how to remove the heatsink and clean out the dust.  All laptops will accumulate dust over time, and when it gets stuck in the innards it can cause problems and shorten the lifespan.

However, I was unprepared for the magnitude of the dust involved.  I was so unprepared I didn’t even take a picture with my trusty Purple Camera, so you will have to make do with this Close Visual Approximation:

Dust Bunny

Close Visual Approximation

Once the offending lagomorph was removed, the laptop – a Toshiba Satellite M45 – worked like a champ and no longer stank of impending doom.   I also installed the Edubuntu educational software package for any kids that might want to play with it.

The moral of the story is that 1.  Chick-Fil-A is delicious, 2. Dust can get large, and 3. Your geriatric laptop may still have life in it with a good de-rabbitizer and Ubuntu.

Installing New Hard Drive on Old Laptop

 Computer Stuff, General  1 Response »
Aug 032010
 

If you are a technically inclined person, I know what you’re thinking – “Geez, what a simpleton.  My pet capuchin monkey can do that!”  But WAIT!  Does your pet capuchin monkey have a 2006 Dell Insprion e1505 with a Dell Media Direct HPA partition?  No?  Then let’s move on.

The thing about the aforementioned partition (and I didn’t know what it was either before Google told me) is that it prevents you from simply cloning the hard drive, popping it in, and making it work.  I learned this the hard way with a BSOD (that’s Blue Screen of Death if you have an aversion to acronyms).  Then, to add insult to injury, not only did the thing poop out the ol’ blue screen, it also took the brand new 320GB hard drive, and told me it was just 70-ish GB, the size of the old hard drive, and nothing would bring it back to normal!

That’s when the panic attack happened, and I thought of how my dear husband had seemed chagrined when I had invested in a new hard drive for a geriatric computer.  So hours of internet searching later, I downloaded this Feature Tool from Hitachi, the maker of the new hard drive, and got the truncated space back.  Whew.  Close one.  But now what do I do with this nice new drive if I can’t clone it?

I was about to give up and admit defeat when I found this handy guide which solved my problem, on page 12.  I followed the directions, re-cloned the drive, installed it, crossed my fingers, held my breath, and… Windows came up just as normal, with all my old stuff, no BSOD, and a good deal faster to boot (both literally and figuratively).  Case closed.