Update - 062109
Ok. so here it it. Fathers day. My boy's are sleeping late which I enjoy. I feel they will be up very soon. It's after 10 in the morning already. I have been waiting for this age for a long time. The lazy days of summer. Where you get to sleep late and no one is trying to get you up early. It's funny how when you are in school you look forward to Summer and when you move into the working world you view may change. I find summer to be nice and hot. I don't mind the heat really. Though it will make me cranky. Currently this morning I am enjoying the silence and catching up on some much needed facebook work. Ok not really. I don't do much on facebook to be true. I usually update my facebook by other apps that I have been using for years. I hate to double post stuff. I've been using facebook for years so I am not about to change. it does what I want and conveys what I want to say.
I had a little bit of computer work fall into my lap. The first one was a Dell Dimension 2400 I think. P4 2.53 with 128MB of ram. No that isn't a typo. It was running windows XP with 128 MB of ram? DDR no less LOL I bout fell out my chair. While it is possible to run XP with 128 MB of ram it is like pulling your hair out waiting for it to do something. :) I had some extra ram Laying around and fixed the problem. The problem was easy to fix once I could see the problem. Now it took me something like 45 minutes to get the machine to a point where I could actually see something on the screen. I had to reload the video driver as I think the memory for the video was shared with the system. It was a bit glitchy. It is working much better now with 768. I would of put in more if I had it laying around but you do with what you have. :) It's a happy little machine now. It only had a 40 GB HDD but as two people use this machine and the Hard Drive was only half full I didn't feel it warranted an upgrade.
The second was the wife's laptop hard drive. She had been complaining that it has been too small for a long time and we have wanted to upgrade to a 7200 RPM 320 GB drive for along time. Well money is tight and we had a 320 GB 5400 RPM drive. I used a couple of free to home user apps to complete this task. They are:
Self Image
and
EASEUS Partition Master
Self Image was nice because it imaged the drive inside windows to a USB drive. If you have ever used Norton's Ghost app then you know this has been an issue for the older versions. I do not have any newer versions of Ghost because, well just because. I have seen that Ghost 14 will backup to a USB drive as a scheduled task but ya know what? I don't need to back up my drive that often. Maybe once a month if at all. I really don't store anything important on my computer. And what I do store can be saved to a flash drive not a hard drive image.
You all know that I like to run different OS and I am currently running/testing the Windows 7 RC. I am confident that I will upgrade to Windows 7 when it becomes available/When I can afford it. I have not had any major problems with it. I did have a little problem wtih it and Trillian Astra Beta. But as Astra is still in Beta I don't think it is a real issue. Everything else has worked. I am currently trying to run Free Realms on it and as I ran into a permission issue on my hard drive in general and not with the program I think it should be ok.
The Permission issue I think spawned from the fact that I had disable UAC (very easy to do in Win7) and it had created a problem some place. It was easy to re-enable and that fixed my permission issues.
The other thing I did was updated my drivers for my video card(s) Nvidia has actually released some drivers for Win7 now and I am giving them a run.
OK here is another piece of software I discovered this week. Cyberlink's Media Show Espresso. Retails for about $40 but if you do any amount of video transcoding and you happen to have a decent video card(s) in your system then this software is an awesome must.
It makes use of your Video card's processors to help speed up the process. Put it to you this way a 30 minute program took me 6 minutes to convert from VOB to MP4. Very nice indeed.
Ah well I think that's about all I have going on at the moment.
My brother had a bit of bad luck the other day. As he doesn't have a wife I think he is trying to make one LOL.. No just kidding. He likes to do home automation. It's a side hobbie of his. So his media center/Home automation system up the chuck the other day. He did have a relative recent backup and was able to get a lot of it back up and working. The computer was a complete loss. Ebay to the rescue. he was able to find an older model Dell to take the reigns. I kept telling him to not get a celeron for this type of application that it would benefit more from a real P4 at least. So he followed in suit and got a P4. The system is working a lot better and the sound card is of higher quality then his last one so there are less problems with his computer hearing him. I think it will be a fortutitus failure.
Ah well thats enough of that. :)
Catch you all around somewhere.
--OUT
I had a little bit of computer work fall into my lap. The first one was a Dell Dimension 2400 I think. P4 2.53 with 128MB of ram. No that isn't a typo. It was running windows XP with 128 MB of ram? DDR no less LOL I bout fell out my chair. While it is possible to run XP with 128 MB of ram it is like pulling your hair out waiting for it to do something. :) I had some extra ram Laying around and fixed the problem. The problem was easy to fix once I could see the problem. Now it took me something like 45 minutes to get the machine to a point where I could actually see something on the screen. I had to reload the video driver as I think the memory for the video was shared with the system. It was a bit glitchy. It is working much better now with 768. I would of put in more if I had it laying around but you do with what you have. :) It's a happy little machine now. It only had a 40 GB HDD but as two people use this machine and the Hard Drive was only half full I didn't feel it warranted an upgrade.
The second was the wife's laptop hard drive. She had been complaining that it has been too small for a long time and we have wanted to upgrade to a 7200 RPM 320 GB drive for along time. Well money is tight and we had a 320 GB 5400 RPM drive. I used a couple of free to home user apps to complete this task. They are:
Self Image
and
EASEUS Partition Master
Self Image was nice because it imaged the drive inside windows to a USB drive. If you have ever used Norton's Ghost app then you know this has been an issue for the older versions. I do not have any newer versions of Ghost because, well just because. I have seen that Ghost 14 will backup to a USB drive as a scheduled task but ya know what? I don't need to back up my drive that often. Maybe once a month if at all. I really don't store anything important on my computer. And what I do store can be saved to a flash drive not a hard drive image.
You all know that I like to run different OS and I am currently running/testing the Windows 7 RC. I am confident that I will upgrade to Windows 7 when it becomes available/When I can afford it. I have not had any major problems with it. I did have a little problem wtih it and Trillian Astra Beta. But as Astra is still in Beta I don't think it is a real issue. Everything else has worked. I am currently trying to run Free Realms on it and as I ran into a permission issue on my hard drive in general and not with the program I think it should be ok.
The Permission issue I think spawned from the fact that I had disable UAC (very easy to do in Win7) and it had created a problem some place. It was easy to re-enable and that fixed my permission issues.
The other thing I did was updated my drivers for my video card(s) Nvidia has actually released some drivers for Win7 now and I am giving them a run.
OK here is another piece of software I discovered this week. Cyberlink's Media Show Espresso. Retails for about $40 but if you do any amount of video transcoding and you happen to have a decent video card(s) in your system then this software is an awesome must.
It makes use of your Video card's processors to help speed up the process. Put it to you this way a 30 minute program took me 6 minutes to convert from VOB to MP4. Very nice indeed.
Ah well I think that's about all I have going on at the moment.
My brother had a bit of bad luck the other day. As he doesn't have a wife I think he is trying to make one LOL.. No just kidding. He likes to do home automation. It's a side hobbie of his. So his media center/Home automation system up the chuck the other day. He did have a relative recent backup and was able to get a lot of it back up and working. The computer was a complete loss. Ebay to the rescue. he was able to find an older model Dell to take the reigns. I kept telling him to not get a celeron for this type of application that it would benefit more from a real P4 at least. So he followed in suit and got a P4. The system is working a lot better and the sound card is of higher quality then his last one so there are less problems with his computer hearing him. I think it will be a fortutitus failure.
Ah well thats enough of that. :)
Catch you all around somewhere.
--OUT