Nico’s

A couple of months ago, I got myself a new computer. I ordered all the parts from NewEgg, and put it together myself. If you’re not interested on the size of my e-peen, move on down a couple of paragraphs. The parts of the new rig are as follows:

• Intel e8400 Core 2 Duo Processor.
• Gigabyte P35-DS3L motherboard.
• 2x G.Skill 1Gb PC2-6400 RAM.
• EVGA nVidia 9600GT Video card.
• All in a fancy and very slick Antec P182 case.

After a couple of months of not having used my old PC, and not having any use for it at all, I decided to hand it down to my AFS family. (These are the people that hosted me while I was an exchange student, for those of you who are just tuning in).
Well, here’s where the dilemma started. They already had a Windows PC, and it would have been a hassle to re-install every single program, and to re-create the accounts, permissions, and transfer all the logins, passwords and documents. What to do, what to do!
I couldn’t just slap their computer’s Hard Drive into my old PC, because Windows ties to the hardware in some black magic kind of way, and it would have thrown a fit if I’d done that. No, can’t do that… or can I?
Turns out, you can!
Once again, the benefits of ponying up $10 for SomethingAwful pay off, and I find this great article at one of the many goon projects: http://shsc.info/MovingWindowsToNewHardware.
Just what I needed! So I set off to sysprep the old system, and after that was done, I installed the HDD into the new one.
I booted it up, and… shit, wait. Wtf, blue screen? And then it reboots, without even letting me see what’s going on? Damn it, what do I do now!
I put the HDD back in to the old system, let it boot… At least it still works, and I haven’t entirely blown the Windows install.
I read the article again… and it says that if that happens, you can just do a windows install in repair mode, and you’ll be golden, so I take the HDD out again, and put it in the new one.
Great, I forgot to sysprep it. It goes back to the old hardware, I sysprep it, and once again it comes into the new hardware.
I run the repair install, and after the usual 20 or so minutes, it’s done.
Awesome, everything worked! The last thing that it needs now is to find the drivers for the new hardware, and it’s good to go.
It took me about one hour to find drivers for the motherboard, and I ended up just installing generic nVidia nforce3 drivers, which seem to work just fine.

I found it to be pretty cool that I could do this, and I didn’t have to re-install a whole lot of applications and re-do a lot of work that had already been done. I scored some major points with the fams, and now the kids can play some games from the 21st century (they were using a PIII at 700Mhz with 512MBs of RAM ). This is the feel-good post of the month.

Have you ever reorganized your music files and then found your iTunes to have taken a shit all over your library, marking half of it as invalid, with exclamation marks? If not, please feel free to click here.
If you’ve suffered from this annoyance, and are looking to keep your sanity, pay attention!
After some researching, I came across this magic file (that can be downloaded with the whole SDK here). If you download this little piece of coding heaven, you just do this:

1. Fire up the mighty command prompt. (Start -> Run -> cmd)
2. Navigate to where you saved the file. Let’s pretend it’s on C:\
3. Type the following: cscript removedeadtracks.js and hit enter. *
4. 

* If this doesn’t do anything, you need the Windows Scripting Host. It should be in your computer though, so if you don’t have it, for the love of god, run Windows Update.

I’m getting a MacBook Pro!
George, my boss, approved it, and I should be getting it sometime next week. Of course, he’s involved because this will be a computer for work. But no doubt I will also be using it outside of work, for photography shenanigans and just looking cool while I don’t drink coffee at Starbucks.

I’m excited. I’ve gotten to play a little bit with Macs, so I’m not too scared. As for the windows applications that I must run to get my work done, I’ll probably end up using either Parallels or Boot-camp. And I know for sure I’ll be installing Adium for my instant-messaging needs, because it’s just awesome (although Digsby has really been rocking my world in the last week, on the Windows world).

I’ll have to reformat my current brick laptop, which has served me well, and re-install Windows and all the apps it needs to be passed on, so I won’t be in full Mac mode until probably late next week. But still, I’m getting a Mac!

To break the scary trend of politically charged posts , I’m going to tell you all about my newest USB drive. That’s right. Get into it, people!

I got a 4Gb Cruzer Micro, and the first thing I did after plugging it in, was uninstall U3. No, thanks, I don’t want something installing into my computer for my portable device. And it’s also ugly. And I didn’t want it, I just wanted 4Gbs of storage in my keychain!
Luckily, I was able to uninstall U3 without a problem, but after reading a bit, I guess some people have had trouble in the past. They have a page here to download an uninstaller, which to me says "oh hi, most people are not going to know how to uninstall this bloatware, and out of those, most of them are going to be to lazy to research how to do it, muahahha ".

At any rate, I happily had a device that was nothing but a dumping ground for all my secret documents. I was a happy customer now.

But then, I started wondering. Why would anyone even use U3? I came to find out that it would be useful to have some portable applications that you carry around on your keychain. Like your browser, with all of your bookmarks… And maybe even a password manager, so that you don’t have to remember all your different passwords for myspace, facebook, twitter and Oprah’s fan club site.

So, in search for an alternative, I ran into PortableApps and PStart. I ended up trying PortableApps first, and I haven’t had any problems at all, so I didn’t even make it to the other alternative. Now, I have Firefox, FileZilla, 7-zip, Miranda, Notepad++ and PuTTY, anywhere I go.

And one of these bookmarks that go with me now, is for FreeRice.com. It’s a good time killer for about 10 minutes, which serves multiple functions: entertainment, improvement of my engrish by making me learn new and crazy words, and it helps feed the hungry of the world, by donating 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program for each word you get right. Go check it out!

This weekend I played and finished the game Portal. Man was it awesome. For those of you that are not too much into gaming, I’ll first point you to a video clip:

Now, what I liked best about this game, a single player, first person action/puzzle hybrid, is that it was short but very interesting. It took me about 5 hours of total gameplay to get to the finish, but it only took about 2 to figure out how the game works. This alone makes this my new game to show to people who don’t know about gaming but want to. A "intro to gaming" game, if you will. The humor, simplicity and escalating difficulty make Portal one of the best games I’ve played.

I haven’t tried the challenge maps yet, but I’m sure they’ll suck a few more hours out of me.

PS: Oh yeah, you have to listen to the review by this guy, Zero Punctuation. Here it is:

If it’s on the internet, it must be true!

And since that is my official job title, it makes it my day. Who would have known?

You can send presents, money, monkeys that fling banana peels or just wishes in my direction. They will all be welcome.

This weekend I decided I’d go back to Windows XP. For no good reason, my install of Vista started acting up: everything and anything I plugged in would suddenly require drivers. From my keyboard and mouse to my camera, USB drives and iPod. Didn’t make any sense at all because they were all working without problems, but all of a sudden, they all needed drivers. I thought an update from Windows messed something up, so I tried restore points, uninstalling whatever I had installed lately… no luck.
So, I decided I’d wipe it all out and go back to XP. What a breeze! Reformated my main HDD, and 30 minutes later I was running XP without any problems. A couple of hours later, after specialized drivers, downloads and a few updates, I was set to go, so I launched my benchmark: Counter Strike Source.
My, oh my! In Vista, I was getting 50 fps at most, with details turned down to low and medium… in XP, I’m hitting 100fps constantly, with everything turned on high! It looks so nice, and it plays so nice
All my other programs also run great, and I can’t believe I got used to answering questions every 30 seconds asking me if I really wanted to do something.

Maybe part of my problems with Vista is that I don’t own a top-end PC. I have a humble Athlon 64 3400+, with 1.5 GBs of RAM and an nVidia 6800gt. Vista certainly wasn’t using it as well as XP is, so that is why I’ve gone back to XP, and I’ll probably stick to it for a lot longer.

Last night I installed Vista as my main OS on my PC. I reformatted my main HDD, wiped XP along with that, and after 30 minutes, I was good to go. I also uninstalled it from my work laptop, but regardless of that, I had no trouble with the activation on a 2nd totally different PC. I was kind of worried about this because Cory said that I was not going to be able to re-activate on a 2nd computer. I guess I found out by myself!
Today I finish installing all my games, so we’ll see how things run. The only problem I had last night was that it didn’t automagically load drivers for my SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS card. That was about it

25 minutes after having made a new partition and popping in the DVD, Vista is ready to go. It was a REALLY easy install. A few clicks here, a lot of watching a progress bar go… and that was it. I’ve had to install ZERO drivers, and I’m on a laptop, so that’s quite impresive. Video card, built-in wireless, mousepad, sound, ethernet… you name it, it’s working out of the “box”.

This is very fancy. I wanted to take a screenshot of what it looks like for me (I get a 3.8 Experience Index!), but you can’t PrntScrn and paste into paint. Dissapointment #1 makes its way in 5 minutes into Vista. Oh well, I’m sure there’s a newer way and I just haven’t found out yet.

*update 1: Found it! It’s called the snipping tool. I like it, you can actually drag and select what you’re taking a screenshot of. And save as .jpeg or .png!

1. The problems that the website was having are gone. Dreamhost (the webhosting company where my site is) has AWESOME support, and they nailed the answer down without even looking at my website. Just from my problem description they knew what I needed to do… so I did it, and the problems were gone! For those curious/nerds: I’m using wp-cache and PHP5, and there’s a slight incompatibility between the two. I had to change one line of code to fix it.
2. Today at work I was handed my own laptop. It’s a Dell Inspiron 9200, with a 2.1Ghz Centrino Processor, 1Gb of RAM and an ATI 9700 video card. I didn’t have to pay to get it, they just gave it to me! I’m at home right now, took me about 10 seconds to get it hooked to my wireless network, and as I’m typing this post right now, I’m also downloading some essentials so that I can put it to good use ;)
3. When I got home, there was an envelope addressed to me, from Microsoft. I opened it, and guess what I got? Microsoft Vista business Edition, for FREE. That’s right, for absolutely nothing. About 3 months ago I signed up at www.powertogether.com and watched some webcasts, and I got qualified for a free copy of Vista. And today I got it, a whole week before its official release. WOOOO! I’m not sure if I’ll be installing it yet, but I have it, and it was free.