15 January 2008

Temporarily Offline

The lovely world of computer problems and a disk going belly-up is sidelining me.

I may still be able to get some posts done off of my laptop... always have multiple systems available when something seriously goes wrong, you never know when you will need an operational spare.

Time to resolution more than one day and less than one week with a bit of luck.

In theory this should be a quick resolution, but I am too familiar with practice to count on that, yes the Theory and Practice conundrum strikes once more!

4 comments:

Kiddo said...

I'm voting the Cthlthu/Dagon ticket, personally. I would have last time had I known the disaster that had awaited us. Azagthoth for Secretary of Defense.

A Jacksonian said...

I always figured Nyarlathotep for the VP slot... pull in a bit of that more local vote and more down to earth sort.

We should be able to recruit some Mi-Go for the INTEL services... naturals for that.


Once I passed a restaurant and thought for sure it read:

Father Dagon's Human Cuisine

But I did misread it.

Bloviating Zeppelin said...

AJ: is it a computer issue or a PC issue. I am SO about completely DONE with Microsoft and PCs. I am saving for my first modern Mac.

BZ

A Jacksonian said...

Mr. Z - Its a bit complicated... my main system is one I have been upgrading over the years and the disk drives tend to forward migrate by one generation, sometimes two. So what happened when I took out a RAID subsytem (backed up as necessary) was that some minor component of the operating system loader decided it no longer liked my setup.

Now it turns out that I never turned the main disk with the operating system on it as a boot drive... so I'm dredging up my skills to deal with that.

The OS was WinXP x64 which has been stable since I first installed it (a minor install issue or two to start with, but that was years ago, now).

Needless to say when *that* happened my new notebook from Dell decided to go belly-up. This was due entirely to Win Vista. As I need a couple of operating computers in the house, it remains at Vista (until I can get a nice install of WinXP x64 on it).

Also my niece arrived with an inoperable system from ibuypower, whom I may want to throttle...

So yesterday was Dellday, where the nice tech support person went by his script and three hours later it was restored... needing my old laptop and thumbdrive to transfer drivers that had suddenly gone walkabout.

Today is slapping myself upside the head day as I realize that I missed during the original install... my fault entirely!

Tomorrow is to examine ibuypower and possibly have a nice chat with tech support and let them know it gets *fixed* or my money back.

For me my installed base of PC software is keeping me in thrall of the MotherShip. For all the cute 'run both on one platform' of current Macs, I do remember their attitude in the past of prosecuting clone makers, offering some companies to make clones and then shutting that off when they realized they weren't selling as many from Apple, prosecuting those (or at least threatening to) who tried to move the Mac to the PC platform in the '90s...

I am holding out for an easy-to-use and configure Linux that requires no guru-capability and has an acceptable user interface for *me*. Not my tech bretheren. I am no longer a coder so my needs for that is miniscule.

Apple earned my distrust going on 20 years.

Linux is moving to the ease-of-use point when that community starts to realize that human computer interface is an important thing.

MS I loathe for their unstable operating systems and haughty attitude towards what everyone *needs* that they bundle it in until the OS is unstable. Their openness to developers got them market and they haven't addressed the problems of their OS' until they rattled apart.

The cost of shifting apps to a different platform is currently in the $2k region for me. So a $2K Mac or Linux machine is, effectively, $4k. When equivalents are available...

So I am looking to lock an end-of-life OS that *works* with the tools I like until something better comes along. This should buy me three years or so, and I still have two ancient systems for light use running Win2K... I know how to wait and will do so at this point... and rollback my notebook to something *trusty* once its warranty expires.

If I had to buy new and didn't have an investment on installed software, nor my biases? Probably a Mac... which is just BSD Unix with a fancy face slowing it down. Toss up between that and Linux, possibly a GNOME branch from a reputable seller with some support... Red Hat otherwise. Virtualized operating systems for running apps is the key... and right now that is in the Linux world.

In three years? We shall see.