Cameron's Thoughts

My desktop has reached the two year old mark now. Though, it's been non-operational for the last month. A while back my DVD burner died, but it wasn't the end of the world. I was backing up a lot of files to it at the time and my have over-worked it. It was, after all, the generic burner Dell gives out. At some point, I ended up subscribing to Netflix and along with that started to make copies of all the decent movies I rented. This was fine at first, I have 1.3TB of space on that machine. Though it may seem like a lot of space, once you account for the porn and all those DVD ISO's, it goes away quick. So, with some money I got for my birthday, I decided to by a new burner.
Now, I hate to turn off or reboot my computer. So, the burner sat in a box for a week or so. Within that time, I came home from work one night to find my computer off. And it wouldn't turn on. Being the tech I am, I did the normal troubleshooting such as stripping the box down to just the motherboard, RAM and video card. Still nothing. I decided to take the CMOS battery out as resetting the BIOS was the last idea I had. After I did that, all of a sudden the box started to power on. I was happy for about a half second. Then a flame came from the bottom side of the video card. This scared the shit out of me as I have never seen a literal fire inside a computer. After my reflexes powered the box off, the flame went out on it's own. I was able to get the box up and running with a crappy 32MB PCI card. This lead to me purchasing a new video card. Which of course, is kinda nice as it's better than what I had before. Being a mostly non-gamer though, it's not something I would like to invest money in. I could have bought another hard drive
Once my video card arrived in the mail, I had to test it out. I feared one thing in the back of my mind. I was worried there may have been damage to the PCI Express slot. And what do you know, the new card didn't work either. So, I realized at this point that I was now going to have to buy a new motherboard. This is not as easy as it sounds. My desktop came with an 'awesome' BTX motherboard. A failed attempt by Intel to redesign motherboards. Of course, they canceled BTX boards. Neither Newegg nor Tigerdirect even have a single one on their site. I checked out eBay. There were two different boards total. One was shitty, one was fairly better than what I have now. So..., now I am left with the decision. Go with the one single selection of BTX board I can find, or replace the entire case and board.
Couple more weeks go by. At this point, I have just been using my laptop and remote desktop to access my desktop. This worked well. That was, until I got an error from Window's saying it couldn't write a file to the disk. Long story short, my newish 750GB drive is dead. This was my baby. And now, my computer is basically in shambles.
Thankfully, I should be getting some decent money back from my taxes. I owe my mom some money, so she is getting the first dibs on it, but after that, I need to fix this heap of parts. I am also thinking that replacing the power supply may not be a bad idea. With the fire, and the dead hard drive, I think these issues may stem from the power supply failing. Also, it's not a very strong one anyways, it's only rated at 350W and it's running the power hungry Pentium D along 4 hard drives.
Anyhow, I've since been getting a lot of use out of my laptop, but I certainly don't want to kill this thing. I don't really like having it running non-stop.

If you tried to install Windows Vista and weren't successful, you may have had a issue where you have a new boot loader that tries to install Vista over and over.

Here's the issue, Windows traditionally has used a boot.ini file to control the boot options for Windows. If you have more than one version, you could configure this file to load different versions. In XP, you could also change some of the settings for this file in the System properties under the 'Advanced' tab and by clicking on 'Settings' under the 'Startup and Recovery' section.

OK, so when I installed Vista, it created a boot menu, and it had a setup option. This is normal for even for previous versions of Windows as it has to reboot during the setup process. In Vista, the timeout is only three seconds, so if you don't want to enter the setup, you have to be quick. Problem is, Vista blue screened during the install. Seems I have a bad copy. But, how do I get rid of the boot menu? I figured it would be as easy as editing the boot.ini file. Nope. Here is comment that now showed up at the top of the boot.ini file.

;
;Warning: Boot.ini is used on Windows XP and earlier operating systems.
;Warning: Use BCDEDIT.exe to modify Windows Vista boot options.
;

No problem, just got to find the BCDEDIT.exe file. A search of my drive shows no results though. Even with hidden and system file scans on. I assumed it probably wasn't installed yet as the install crashed. But, tonight I found it.

Open the command prompt and enter the command

cd "c:\$WINDOWS.~BT\Windows\System32"

You may need to change the drive letter. In here, you will find that BCDEDIT.exe file. To switch back to your XP install, enter the command

bcdedit /default {ntldr}

Now, upon reboot, XP will now be the default.

Ugh. Found out last night that my computer is infected with a virus. I tried opening the command prompt in Windows XP and it promptly closed by itself. After a reboot, it did give me some MS-DOS 16-bit subsystem illegal error of some kind. Since the only Internet connection I had at the time was a far away open WiFi connection and I was getting 1-2kB download speeds, I downloaded McAfee Stinger which is a small program that removes about 50 of the most recent common virus's. This is something I know about from work as I have recommended it a number of times. If you have a worm that is sucking up most of your bandwidth, many times this is the only thing you can successfully download. Anyway, that did remove one worm off of my machine. Now today, I downloaded Avast as I don't have any anti-virus software on my computer. This is another free program that we recommend to our customers at my work and I have used it on my other computer and it works great. This only problem is, it's been running for about and hour now, and has only scanned 34,000 files. I have 90,000 files on the disk. This could take forever. I guess I should get ready to go to work. I found out it's going to be hell tonight. Nearly half the people working tonight have called in sick. Fuck.

I have never heard of this clown before, but he is apparently "in the industry". Charles Cooper from CNet decided to ask the question, "Why does PC support stink?". He is under the impression that his support issues with Symantec are all Symantecs fault and are a prime example of the tech support field.

All he really shows in this article that he wrote is that most problems people have with their computer all come down to the same issue. This is something that causes more computer trouble than all virus's, spyware and Microsoft bugs combined. This issue is something called PEBKAC. Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair. What do I mean by this? All headaches that Charles had were all user problems and misunderstandings. Not problems that Symantec caused. What Charles was upset about was he was being charged for calling tech support. Symantec makes no hidden claims in what the charges are. Go to their support page.

Fee-based Technical Support $29.95 per incident, 6 A.M. to 5 P.M. PT, Monday through Friday (Fee may be waived if Support Representative determines that the issue was caused by the product.)

Virus Removal Support $39.95 - $69.95 per incident, 6 A.M. to 5 P.M. PT, Monday through Friday

That seems pretty clear to me. But, what is the other thing that Charles was upset about. Oh yea, he had to wait for two hours on hold. And, he called on a Sunday. But, the hours listed show they offer support Monday-Friday. I would say he is lucky anyone ever answered. Does this guy think the world should just serve him however he wants whenever he wants at his terms? If they state that they offer support at a certain amount at certain times, that's what will happen. Don't complain because you can't comprehend basic English.

Now, don't get me wrong. I am not saying that nothing is wrong with Symantec at all. That is quite a bit of money to pay for support. At the same time, computer support is just expensive. But, that's why you shouldn't purchase software if you don't agree with the terms of the cost's assoicated with using and supporting the product. I mean, there are alternatives to Norton Anti-Virus. Acutally, there are some pretty decent free one's such as AVG and Avast. At least if you went that route, you wouldn't feel so ripped off if you didn't get something for free that you were execpting.

Update (03-07-05 12:09PM):I made an update to this post to correct a mis-statement of mine that was incorrect.

I finally got my laptop back on Friday. They replaced the motherboard and everything is working fine now. I am so happy. Haven't really been online much though as I had been fairly busy this weekend. Hopefully I will be able to catch up lost time with the computer shortly though.

Yea, in case you were wondering, I still do not have my laptop back. They said 5-10 days. That was 16 days ago.

I have just completed nearly a week with limited personal computer usage.  I am still using a computer all the time at work, but we have been so busy that I never have any free time to just surf and do personal things.  Execpt for tonight.  We finally aren't busy.
But, at home, I have been using a laptop because I am never able to just sit in my office and use the computer.  I have kids to watch.  So, the laptop is great.  But, the thing stopped charging right a couple months ago.  Seems the AC jack was not connected to the motherboard very well.  At first, you just had to jiggle the cord a bit, and the connection would be fine, and it would charge.  Then it kept getting harder and harder to do.  Eventually, getting the cord in the exact spot required over five minutes of tugging the cord in different directions to get it in the exact spot so it would charge.  And then, the slightest bump, and you would lose it.  Then, sometimes it just wouldn't charge at all if the machine was on.  It would stop charging the second the power button turned on, and then start again the second the machine turned off.  I took the machine in to Circuit City where I bought it and tested it on their AC adaptor so I could see if it was a problem with the cord.  Had the same trouble there too.   Called Toshiba, and the guy I spoke made it seem like a common thing.  Can't remember, but I think he might have even said that it happened a lot with the motherboards.  But, he seemed pretty familiar with it and said the motherboard needed to be replaced.  So, for the last week, the machine has been at a repair shop.  They said it would take 5-10 days since they would have to order the part and replace it.  Too bad it's not a desktop and I could have just fixed it myself.
So, for the time being, I am holding on.  I am getting way behind on reading my RSS feeds.  I hardly have time to read my e-mail.  And work on my site has almost come to a halt.  I did put some new code in the other night at work that let's me tweak certain things per post.  Like I can turn off ads in indivdual posts, or even make the ads bigger.  I plan on adding other 'per post' tweaks, maybe that's what I will do later tonight.  I have had a lot of free time today.  I just had a 12 minute gap between my last two calls, and the last call was only a minute long.

Just tried out this trick to speed up Firefox and it works great. It actually does work real well and I think is the same thing that makes Opera feel so quick. If you have a high-speed connection, you should try it out.

The trick can be found here:
http://forevergeek.com/open_source/make_firefox_faster.php

Much like the Livesearch feature I am using on this website, Google has now setup this same feature. This only makes sense since the Livesearch was based on Google's Gmail address search. Not only that, Google has a better reason to have this feature, since search is it's main job. Presenting, Google Suggest.

This works like a dream.

I have been using the Cablespeed "Lite" service for Internet for a while now as my cable provider is basically a rip off. I'm paying about $45 a month for this and the lite service only offers 128k down and 64k up. It's nothing great, but somewhat better than dialup and is always on. I am switching to DSL soon, but I need a new phone jack installing in the office, and since I am no electrician, I will be hiring someone to do this. I am going to wait until after Christmas once the finances are more stable.
But, yesterday, or maybe the day before, all of a sudden, downloads seemed so much faster. I just downloaded some podcasts, such as the new 1src podcast, and that 5MB file just zipped down to my computer. So I decided to run some speed tests. MDM has a speed test on their site, so I figured that would provide me with the highest possible speed. I ran that a couple months ago and got a reading of 140k. Today I got 377k. Awesome. So, I then went to DSL Reports to get a more 'real life' reading since their test servers are located across the country in California. Before I got a reading of 122k down and 60k up from there. Today I got 354k down and 116k up.
Not sure what happened, I never got any word from MDM about increasing the speed, and their website doesn't mention anything. I actually even called them up and asked if they had any chance of increasing the speed anytime soon, and they said they did not.
Whatever is up, I am very happy. Hope this is not just a fluke and will stay this way.

I downloaded Windows Media Player 10 yesterday to try it out. The final release version is now out. I will have to say, I have been a fan of the Windows Media Player for some time now.
It's never had spyware like it's piece of crap brother, the Real player. It doesn't nag you to purchase it like the Quicktime player. And it plays a number of formats. When codecs are released, there is usually a version that is compatible with the WMP so we can view formats like Divx and Xvid.
WMP 10 ads a new 'media mall' feature. It's nice that they did this. I heard Microsoft was coming out with there own online music store and assumed that the new media player would be set to purchase from there like iTunes does with Apples music store. Instead, Microsoft is allowing easy access to a number of stores including Napster, Wal-Mart, MusicMatch and a few others. While I don't plan to buy any WMA format music, it's a nice setup they have.
Media support is better though. In WMP 9, DVD and MP3 wasn't supported, you have to purchase the codecs for those. I was happy with PowerDVD and already havea copy of that in addition to WinDVD, so I never used WMP for DVD's. But, I love how WMP rips MP3's, so I did purchase Cyberlink's MP3 encoder. I have since ripped most of my CD's using that. But, now with WMP 10, there is built in support for MP3. Also, DVD's are working nicely now too without purchasing any add-ons.
Other improvements, adjustable seek when using the using the taskbar mini-mode. The mini taskbar player is one feature that makes it easy to watch movies and still not have the movies take up the entire screen.Previously, if you wanted to change place in your movie while using this, you have to open up the full window, then adjust the seek. Now, moving your cursor over the window will display a little seek bar. It's still hard to make small adjustments since the window is pretty small, but it's better than nothing.
There is also a radio feature now. I love listening to Internet radio, used to use Winamp for this purpose, now just iTunes, but maybe I can just use WMP now. I haven't really tried this out too much yet, but it's great they finally added this.

Don't have a high speed connection, or just want to have a back up copy of XP Service Pack 2 ready for whenever you need to do a Windows reinstall? Microsoft is now sending out free CD's, no shipping or anything required. Not a bad deal at all. There has been a lot of talk of possible compatibility problems after installing SP2. I wouldn't worry too much about it. Really, the only difference externally is the new firewall and security center. By default, they really bug you if your security isn't up to par. I actually like the fact that the firewall is automatically turned on. I made sure to promptly turn off the firewall and virus protection monitoring. But the average person would never worry about these things until there computer is messed up and they call tech support. Now they have a nag.

Bought a new computer today. A Toshiba Satellite A75-S206. It's a fairly big machine, but is very powerful. Especially since every spec outdoes my desktop, including the screen size. Some of my favorite things, nice 15.4" widescreen XGA LCD and the 802.11g wireless. While I love the 54Mb speed, I was suprised that I was able to get 108Mb connections sometimes too. The Atheros Wi-Fi has one of those unstandard 108Mb modes, but I was under the impression that the router would need to be from the same manufacturer. But the shiny new Linsys router seems to support that too. :D Heres the spec list:

• Mobile Intel Pentium 4 Processor 518 supporting HT Technology (2.80GHz, 1MB L2 cache, 533MHz FSB)
• Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
• 512MB (1DIMM) fixed PC2700 memory module
• 15" Wide-screen XGA display (1280 x 800)
• ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 IGP w/64MB shared video memory
• 60GB HDD (4200 rpm)
• DVD/CD-RW
• Integrated Atheros Wi-Fi (802.11g)

Just posting to say that I had to replace the batteries in my mouse today. I am very impressed though since this is the first time ever doing so. When I first bought the mouse, I worried since it wasn't a rechargeable model. Yet, it was advertised that it would last 6 months on a pair of AA's. I figured that was average usage and a bit exaggerated, so I only expected 3-4 months of usage. But, I bought the mouse in the beginning of December, so it's been over seven months on one pair of batteries. And that is with me being on the computer all the time. It's pretty impressive since the LED's on the bottom never shut off and are fairly bright.

Back in early December, I purchased the Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse 2.0. It's a great wireless mouse. Does have all the buttons all over it like their Explorer mice, but it does have the standard two buttons plus a scroll wheel that not only scrolls up and down, but can rock left and right providing a full range of page scrolling.
This is my first wireless mouse, and the one thing that concerned me was battery life. If I had to keep replacing the batteries, I was likely not to use it much. The box said it would last six months on a pair of AA's. That isn't bad at all, only twice a year. But, I didn't actually expect it to last that long. For one thing, I do use the mouse quite a bit, probably more than average use. Plus, this mouse doesn't have an off button, it is always on. So, I figured that they gave the six month figure as the best you can expect under some rare circumstance. Well, I have now had the mouse for five months, and the battery indicator is still in the good range. Looks like I will probably get the six months usage that I was promised.
Anyone loking for a good mouse might want to consider this. It's optical, so accuracy and no maintenance are nice (If you don't have an optical mouse, you need to upgrade to one, even if it's a cheap one). Plus, the scroll wheel is very smooth, on other mice you can usually hear the clicks as you turn the wheel, this mouse is silent. It even looks stylish too. And you can beat not having a cord.

I don't know why, but recently my computer can't keep track of time anymore. A little bit a go, I was almost late for work because my computer said I had about an hour before I had to be there, but in fact I only had about 20 minutes (this was when I was working at McDonald's). I reset the clock. I have then been having to reset it more frequently as the last couple of weeks have been going on. I have Windows set to automatically update the clock, but it only happens once a week. My friend Neil says I can change that setting, but he never explained how. So, I have downloaded a freeware app called Time Synchronizer. It updates to an atomic clock at the frequency that you set. I have to have it update every hour because I have now figured out I am losing about 2 seconds every minute. Might not sound like too much, but that is two minutes every hour. Leave the computer for 10 hours and come back, the computer is 20 minutes off. Windows' little weekly update isn't very effective for this problem. I would like to find out what is causing this because right now I haven't really solved the problem, I am only masking it. So, for now my clock should be okay, but now that means I need yet another app eating up my precious RAM. If anyone has any idea's what's causing this, feel free to comment. I've already checked to see if there was some kind of IRQ conflict with the real-time clock, but that doesn't seem to be the issue.

I have decided to give up on the SB Live card. Not sure if it's just my PC or what. Maybe I will get around to throwing it in another system and see what happens. It might just show back up on EBay. I can probably sell it for more than I paid for it anyway. So now I am just chilling with my AC97 onboard card with stereo output.

OK, I bought a Sound Blaster Live 5.1 card. It's one of the older ones. I have had problems with the sound stuttering ever since I installed it. It will play fine, but every 30 seconds or so an annoying buzz or skipping of the sound will occur. I have tried a number of steps in order to trace the problem, but so far nothing has worked. (The OS is Win XP BTW)

• I first tried reinstalling the device drivers. That had no effect, so I went and made sure I had the latest drivers and I do.
• I then went ahead and updated the motherboard drivers. That also had no effect.
• Since I needed to anyways, I went ahead and reinstalled Windows. I normally wouldn't have given up so quickly, but I planned on doing this within a few weeks anyway. Still, same results.
• So, I made sure to reinstall all the drivers. I also had some trouble with my NIC card since I installed the sound card. I had an onboard NIC and a PCI NIC, so I just removed the PCI NIC.
• I moved the sound card to a different PCI slot since after removing the PCI NIC, the IRQ of the onboard NIC and sound card were the same. I have now verified that nothing shares any resources with the sound card.
• I also went into the Control Panel, then Sounds and Audio Devices. I went to the Audio tab, advanced properties and turned down the hardware acceleration. This seemed to work the other day, but now I am having the sound problems again.

That's everything I have done so far. I kind of stuck now. Has anyone else experienced similar troubles or am I missing something obvious? I have also posted this at ClieSource hoping to get some more input on this.

I think I have solved my problem of my sound card. It didn't require the Windows reinstall (though it needed to be done anyway, that sound problems just pushed me over the edge). After reinstalling Windows, the sound card still stuttered. Guess what, all I had to do was go into the Control Panel, then go to Sound and Audio Devices, then go to the Audio tab, then the advanced settings. Turned down the hardware acceleration one notch and I was all set. I am very happy now, it was too quiet around here the last week.

Well, as I have now installed w.bloggar my Windows reinstall is complete. This is a task that I rarely get the energy to do, but it is now done. I still have my old Windows install on my other drive, just in case I didn't feel like finishing. It's also nice, since all my files and such are easily assessable via my other drive. That made the Opera browser install a cinch. Just copied my profile folder over and my custom setup along with all bookmarks and all my mail was restored exactly as they were. And I am a data junk collector. I have every e-mail from as far back as 2000 (well, not the spam, otherwise I'd have a 120GB drive full of mail.) So it was important that I didn't lose anything. I have also reinstalled all the essential apps such as instant messengers, video and imaging apps, and most of my Internet stuff. I still have to install my Clie stuff and my Nokia 3650 stuff (fuck, I don't want to deal with the Bluetooth install again ) So, I still have work to do, but I have done enough today.

Well, I haven't yet gotten around to reinstalling Windows on my PC. Some friends wanted me to hang out the other night, so I did that instead. I did however clear one drive and move all my files off if it. I also repartitioned my drives. Now, everything should be pretty easy. Disconnect my drive with Windows that I am currently running, insert the restore disk, and restore my PC. Unfortunately, since I didn't build this computer, it has a restore disk instead of an actual Windows CD .

Well, pretty soon now I am going to being the process of reinstalling Windows on my computer. Right now I am backing up all my old files from my 30GB drive to my 60GB drive and going to install Windows on the 30GB one. I'm not sure the speed of the 60GB drive, I will check it out in a bit, but I know the 30 is 7200RPM so it will be fast. Wish me luck!

This is some news. Daily Gadget is reporting that Gateway has purchased eMachines. Not only that, Ted Waitt, of cow commercial fame and also the founder of Gateway is passing the CEO title to eMachines CEO Wayne Inouye. Waitt will still be the Chaiman though.

I went to the Kazaa Lite website a little while back and seen they had a mega-codec pack available but at the time I didn't download it. Today, I went back to the site to get the codec back, and it was gone. Then I saw this news article at The Register. Looks like Sharman Networks people were able to shut down virtually all download sites. I guess this is probably because they want people to use there new paid version of Kazaa. The article also says that the newer version of Kazaa has the supernodes set to block older versions of the software, and since Kazaa Lite K++ is based on version 2.4, soon this app will no longer function with the rest of the network.
Here's another good news story about this.

Who doesn't like free PC utilities? Joel at ClieSource passed along a link to the 16 best freeware utilities. You can find it here. Some programs I am downloading now include a freeware registry cleaner and freeware DLL cleaner. I know my PC is getting junked up and some cleaning is in order.

How about three posts in one day!
I wrote a little utility about three years ago called My Folder that let's you customize folder icons and change the background image of folders. Oddly, Windows 98 already let you customize the folder backgrounds, but not the folder icons. Now, Windows XP will let you do you the icons, but not the backgrounds. So, I have now uploaded the utility to my website here since it looks like the former download locations no longer exists. A friend of mine had some ideas on some updates I should make to the program that would benefit XP users (XP wasn't out when I created My Folder, only in beta versions). If I get a chance, I might work on some more updates. Actually, there already is an update thaat I wrote, but it had a bug so I removed it a few days after releasing it. Then I never fixed the bug. You can download My Folder 0.94 from this link.

I installed the new Google Deskbar from Google Labs yesterday, and I must say it's pretty nifty. It adds a Google search to your taskbar making it easy to find things. Plus, you don't have to open your browsers. It has it's own mini-browser built-in. I use the Opera web browser and it also has it's own search box at the top that I have set to Google, but I like how easy the deskbar makes it to search using other searches than the normal Google. One click of a button and you can access searches such as News, Groups, Images, Froogle. You can also set custom searches. It comes with a definition and thesaurus. Plus they include a movie review search from Rotten Tomatoes. Also a download search from CNet's Download.com. I added my own custom search from Acronym Finder, making it easy to figure out those strange acronyms. I'd say anyone who loves Google (and who doesn't), should try this out. It's a free download, though still not a finished product.