Now? You want to do this now?
I have a right to know! I'm getting married in four hundred and thirty years!

Friday, June 23

Life

Splatsville

Still having major notebook problems. I've got a 1GB SD card installed at the moment, and I'm saving all my work there rather than the hard disk. It seems to run fine most of the time, but it's a pain in the butt when it needs to boot.

I'll try swapping drives again this weekend.

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Thursday, June 22

Geek

Aha! (Maybe)

It's not the memory - Memtest-86 gives it a clean bill of health.

It's not the disk - checkdsk runs fine, and my applications have no problems.

Windows says it's a disk problem but it acts like it's a memory problem.

What can cause that?

The pagefile. The evil, good-for-nothing, rat bastard pagefile.

I thought to myself If this were a real operating system, it would have a log of all these errors.

Then I thought, It is a real operating system. A crappy one, but a real OS nonetheless.

And it has crappy log files, but they exist, and they were full of errors - all relating to the pagefile.

As soon as I manage to get the darn thing to boot, I'm going to disable it.

Again. I already disabled it, but it didn't take. Who knows why; this is Windows.

Okay, it finished booting, and now has no pagefile.

Let's see if it crashes.

...

So far, so good. I did get one of those "delayed write failed" errors (so maybe it is the disk after all), but I managed to watch last week's episode of Haruhi Suzumiya on my new TV without anything catching fire, blowing up, crashing, or collapsing into a closed space.

Which is good enough for now.

Tomorrow I send the motherboard from my new PC back for replacement. Then I plan to (finally!) get the forms processing working in Minx. This is an example of what you can do with fairly simple templates; I intend to expand on that. A lot.

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Cool

In Other News

Corel wrote to me and said, essentially, Yeah, our Paint Shop Pro pricing in Australia sucks. We know, and we're working to fix it, but we're tied up in old distribution contracts.

For those who haven't been following the story: I can download Paint Shop Pro online for $59. Except I can't, because I live in Australia.

I can buy it in a box for $79, less a $30 mail-in rebate. Except I can't, because I live in Australia.

Because I live in Australia, it costs me two hundred and ninety-nine dollars.

But at least they have acknowledged the problem.

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Wednesday, June 21

Geek

Okay Then

Either not the memory, or not only the memory.

Joy.

Update: Memtest-86 is on the third pass without finding any errors.

Not the memory, then.

Not the disk drive, since I swapped that yesterday and it died within ten minutes.

It happens whether I'm on battery or mains power.

Grr.

Dell is having a sale right now...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:26 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Geek

It Was The Memory

I'm just hoping it was only the memory.

Swapped drives in my notebook: BSOD within 10 minutes.

Pulled out the original 256MB of memory: No BSOD so far.

Windows Explorer has restarted a couple of times, but that is not exactly unusual. I'm going to run another checkdsk, because if the memory was playing up, there could be some nasty things lurking in my filesystem.

No progress on the media centre box; looks like that will have to go back for the friendly folks at EYO to take a look at. I've been buying stuff from them for years, and this is the first time something has just plain not worked. Video cards that don't run under Linux, sure. Network cards that are incompatible with my motherboard, yep. And the Hard Drive Destruction Bunny is always lurking around the next corner. But this is the first time I haven't been able to get a new toy to at least boot.

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Cool

I've Seen Things You People Wouldn't Believe

apotheosis, commenting at Protein Wisdom:
Clara Bow was the IT girl.

Then there came pixie misa. Who has watched server farms glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.

Hate to disillusion the fellow. So I won't.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:28 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Life

That'd Be Right

Bought a new media centre PC.

It doesn't work.

Oh, and my notebook died about thirty times last night. It may or may not be the hard disk. It was working this morning, but when I got to the office and tried to bring it back from standby it cold booted.

I do have a backup.

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Sunday, June 18

Life

Speaking Of Which

Working 15 hour days, 7 days a week, gets to you after a while.

I haven't even watched the latest episode of Haruhi Suzumiya yet.

I have a brand new HDTV, and I haven't watched anything on it.

<Dies.>

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:38 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Life

Yes

DDoSed again.

"Interesting" isn't the term I'd use, though. "Bloody irritating", perhaps.

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Wednesday, June 14

Cool

Whoa!

Also Woo!

Got home, plugged the 360 into the new TV (a Samsung LA27T51B), loaded Oblivion and -

Niiiiice.

I was playing it on my computer monitor before. That's a 19" Samsung multifunction, with DVI/VGA/Component/S-Video/Composite/TV inputs, and it's a very nice computer monitor. But it's only 19", and it's 4:3, not widescreen. Effectively (if I can still extract square roots in my head correctly) it's about 17" for a widescreen image.

The new set is 27", which doesn't sound that much larger, but it is.

And the picture quality, even on component input, is superb.

Let's see what my notebook makes of it...

Hmm. Works - almost.

At 1280x768, I get a perfect picture. But it's not a 1280x768 screen, it's 1366x768. 16:9, and bugger sensible resolutions. So if I run it in that mode, everything will be about 6% wider than it should be.

My notebook actually recognises the resolution, and offers an option for 1360x768 (which is what the manual says it should do). But either the notebook or the monitor (and I hope it's the notebook) gets the timing wrong, and the image starts about one fifth of the way across the screen; the leftmost fifth is blank.

1280x720 would get rescaled, but would have the proportions right. But the monitor comes up Mode not supported. Bah. The manual says that it supports all modes between 640x480 and 1360x768, but that don't seem to work so well.

Hmm.

Okay, let's see what we can adjust on the monitor. Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle. Damn. Even at the maximum settings, I can't get the picture quite right. Well, let's try the Auto Adjust, just for laughs.

Hmm. Close, but there's still grey bars down the left and right, which will get kind of annoying. If I could get rid of...

Oi!

What?

Your wallpaper is 1280x1024, right?

Yes?

And this monitor is?

1360 by... oh. Right.

Okay, now that it's working perfectly, let's fire up some widescren video, like, oh, the Kamichu! opening.

...

Okay. I'm sold.

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