Real Life – Page 7 – The Kind Healer

Desktop Status – All Clear (Mostly)

Good Grief, I forgot how long it takes to generate one of these custom CDs (or now, in my case, DVD, as I started placing other software on it – like Ghost).

Anyway, everything important (for work) appears to be back up and happy. Fun gotchas included the lack of a current network driver; Gigabyte’s driver page did not show one, so I figured it was merged into the chipset driver file – NOT, and I should know better. I ended up pulling that off the previous CD, then letting Windows Update fix it to current.

One interesting gotcha involves Ghost migrations of very large partitions (say, a video/VCD/ISO/’misc stuff’ collection). Generating the image dump (92 gig compressed) was fine, but migrating it from the new WinXP install back to my new (larger) partition gave an ‘out of memory’ error. So I fired up the Recovery CD (I got Ghost 14 over the weekend as the recovery disk is now Vista-based), and finally got the new partition migrated.

The video card drivers got a severe makeover too; Latest Nvidia driver (combined with this card model – 8800 GT) now has PhysX hardware support through the GPU. Too bad that I don’t have anything just now that required the hardware (and not likely to have any just now). Nice bonus though…

I’m still doing some spot recoveries from the backup images (i.e. my FireFox settings), but overall I’m up and running well. Webmail (Exchange) at work is once again responsive, despite its requirement for IE (at least if you want a decent interactive experience *sigh*). Still need to connect to the VPN (and from there the work desktop and/or PuTTY), but I suspect it should be fine now.

No games or other stuff installed yet. I’m dreading the re-install and re-download of my Steam collection (which got rather impressive). And there’s stuff like Oblivion, that I’m pondering not re-adding just yet. Maybe I’ll pull out some old stuff first, like SimCity 4, or *shudder* Riven.

Have Fun y’all,
–TSK

Desktop Woes Again

Well, from the looks of things, something bad has been happening with the desktop. Or, more accurately, Win-XP. But to most folks reading MystBlogs that’s probably not surprising. :-P

In my case that’s a bit exasperated by the install method itself, which was through a heavily nLite-modified CD. I just spent the past several hours reviewing what I did, and am likely to re-do this quite differently:

1) Slipstream of XP-SP3 (and hope my key does not get eaten again, as it did when I slipped SP2 onto an original-release CD *sigh*).

2) No slipping/adding of hotfixes after SP3, or of really wild things like Media Player 11. First of all, the steps were complicated. Second, I can’t find any info as to how I did any of it. And lastly, I’d rather have M$ deal with the problem, despite the need for multiple reboots (just fewer with SP3 in).

3) Do NOT go hog-wild in removing things from XP. My biggest regret so far has been removing Calculator (which in hindsight was also not worth the space savings). I’m probably just going to remove the 2-3 things that are vastly annoying or have severe holes, like Messenger. And as much as I’d like to ‘get rid’ of IE, its going to be difficult when There.com and Steam both use core parts of it.

4) On the same note, do NOT to hog-wild on *adding* things either through nLite. My mantra in creating these CDs has always been ‘Back to Work.’ As this is now the only Windows PC I have (both notebooks went 100% Linux), its become even more imperative. So PuTTY is immediately on the list, along with one or two other things that can speed up my bootstrap (OpenOffice, FireFox, status stuff). Again I made mistakes here on the last CD, this is a good time to correct that.

4) I *will* go nuts this time with services (since they can be rolled back if a mistake was made). I’ve been waiting on SP3 registry files from BlackViper, and *cheer* they’re now available. That’s at least a start, and an excellent reference site (he even has Reg Tweak files for Windows 7!). I highly recommend looking over the site, just be prepared to lose an hour or two reading. ;)

5) In the hardware department, get a new gigabit card as a spare (preferably using PCIe-1x). Something absolutely screwy has been occurring on the one my motherboard has (probably weird drivers), and my only ‘spare’ is an ancient Intel 100Pro card (ordinary PCI no less). It had issues with how I ‘connected’ to my work desktop; Then again, it could be Windows, but better safe than sorry.

—–

I’m also strongly considering a dual-boot with Linux, finally. Just too many stories recently by Myst-ers with crashed Windows installs, and their Linux boot saving the day. If that becomes the case, I’ll probably ‘test-drive’ the CentOS version since that’s what got installed on a couple systems at work (and may be our future variant there). OpenSolaris would be nice, but its not playing nice with the VPN (missing packages).

Right, onwards. We’ll see how this pans out…

/salute
–TSK

Lots Done, Lots to do…

Well, I finally sat down with the site admin tools and did some housecleaning.

T_S_Journal is gone now, other than a couple tar files. Even the subdomain is removed. This site moved up to WP 2.7.1 as well, for the heck of it.

Added a roundcube webmail install, so that I can access the site accounts if needed.

In trying to get roundcube to install, found that I was still on PHP4; Spent the 5 mins and had the account moved to PHP5+FastCGI. Still does not help with the WP Admin login. *sigh*

In the ‘lots to do’ catagory, still got to get the pics moved around. Also have to get the B5 mini pics uploaded (from the last convention two weekends ago).

Oh, and there’s also that little last-minute thing about another Pats Parade, but this time in SL. But that’s another story, and one I’ll withhold until its over on the 14th.

–TSK

Illness Non-Fun

I swear, I’ve had it with being sick. This week, it was either a caffeine overdose of some sort (triggering my food allergy to coffee), or I became the lucky recipient of the salmonella nonsense going round. Either way, very bad, very annoying.

Ah well.
–TSK

Pics Link

Current location of images I’ve made public (and easily reachable):

https://sungak.net/zenpic/

For those on the main page (*waves at Dad*) its under ‘Misc’ in my links area (top of left sidebar).

TODO: Need to move the old Telador archive there (from its old location, that is not easily found by search robots), and do some minor cleanup of what I already moved into the image browser. Also need to create a watermark that the software will integrate into viewed images. And good grief, get a current pic of my SL avatar up there!

I also need to archive and shutdown the IC site (T_S_Journal), as I specified a while ago there. But I just spent last night going over the Medicare-related docs and forms that came in for my mother, and my head is reeling a bit.

–TSK