John Topley's Weblog
January 2005 Article Archive109 Steps To Windows' NirvanaSaturday, 22 January 2005I treated my computer to two upgrades for Christmas, neither of which has exactly worked out how I'd hoped. What follows is an abridged account of nearly three weeks of personal computing misery. It all begins with those upgrades… As RAM is almost criminally cheap now, I bought a 512 MB DIMM, and I thought I'd better buy a DVD re-writer seeing as my hard drive is 48 GB full. I ordered the memory and an LG GSA-4160 from dabs.com. I didn't get an e-mail confirmation of my order, because it turns out that you have to opt-in to receive e-mail updates once your account is set up, which I didn't find very helpful. Even then, it took a few days of checking my order status on the website to see that I wouldn't be getting a DVD re-writer after all, because that particular model had become obsolete. They never sent me an e-mail to tell me. I cancelled that part of the order and waited for the memory to arrive. Knowing how particular the Windows NT line has always been about RAM, I'd spent a bit more and bought branded Kingston memory. It arrived, I fitted it—I'm always surprised at how forceful you have to be to get it to lock into place—and all was well. I had a gigabyte of RAM! The next time I used ActiveSync to synchronise my Pocket PC, the screen went black and the computer just seemed to die. It sounded as if the hard drive had powered down, although the system power was still on. There was no blue screen or any sort of crash dump and I had to do a hard reset. At this point I saw the error message that every Windows users dreads: the one where Windows cannot find your System registry hive or it's corrupted. I tried a Last Known Good boot, but that was No Damn Good. Has that ever helped anyone ever get their system back, because it never has for me? I booted into the Windows XP Recovery Console and manually copied the setup copy of the stricken file from the repair directory. Windows got a bit further into the boot process and then went into a chkdsk loop, continuously checking my D: partition, with no way to turn it off. At this point I started to sweat with the realisation that I didn't have a recent disk image to hand, so the prospect of re-installing Windows and all my software was looming large. I cursed myself for being so lapse. I tried to look on the bright side with the thought that I could start afresh with a nice shiny and clean Windows installation that would fair rip along because I would be much more disciplined, and wouldn't install so much guff that meant that I had to scroll the Add/Remove Programs window about eight times to see it all. I could also use it as an opportunity to finally install Windows XP Service Pack 2. So that's what I did. I cleaned out my two partitions reserved for Windows and programs (there's a third for data and a fourth for backups) and roughly 109 steps later, I had a system installed and configured to my taste:
—This process is why I didn't relish the prospect of re-installing Windows! My previous Windows XP installation—dating back to just after I got my present PC—had been going strong for thirty-four months. This new one felt a lot snappier and there were other benefits, such as my modem working better than it had ever managed before. The new features in Service Pack 2 seemed pretty decent, although I'm a bit baffled why when Windows boots it's now just plain Microsoft Windows XP instead of Microsoft Windows XP Professional. The copyright year has gone too. I guess that's to hide the fact that's it's ages since a new version of Windows came out. I've turned off Windows Firewall and replaced it with Agnitum Outpost Firewall Pro, which is about as industrial-strength as software firewalls get. Recommended for £39.99. With some trepidation—but also with a a degree of confidence because I now had recent disk images—I re-synced my iPAQ and all was well. I could even finally use the Explorer shell namespace integration to browse the device from my PC, which had never worked previously. I left the room and came back a few minutes later to see that my monitor screen was an omninous shade of black. The computer was deader than a dead parrot. Fortunately I was able to get Windows back up and running again in just under four minutes, thanks to my up-to-date disk image. I think we should all take a moment to give thanks for the inventors of disk imaging software… Amen. It had to be the new RAM that was the problem. That was what had changed. It was just very strange that the computer only died when using ActiveSync. I'd even upgraded the version of ActiveSync during the 109 steps to Windows' nirvana outlined above. I booted into Memtest86 to give the RAM a thorough workout, but it was all clear. I used the /MAXMEM=512 switch in boot.ini to hide the new memory from Windows and this actually worked. Not a great solution though, having to boot into a memory constrained environment just to use ActiveSync. It stopped working after that anyway. Cue another restore from disk image. Upon advice, I ran Memtest86 for much longer—seventy hours straight— to give the RAM an even more comprehensive going over. It still passed with flying colours. This morning I got down with the hardware again and switched the memory around, so that the new DIMM was in the first bank, rather than the last. It was no good. Another seizure. The latest thing I've tried is to manually select a slower RAM timing in the BIOS, rather than leave it set to automatic. Unbelievably, I've successfully completed a synchronisation without a crash following this change and am even writing this in the same session. I'm being very careful about making sure this article is saved though. So that just might be the memory dealt with, but what about the DVD re-writer? I ordered the new LG GSA-4163B online from Micro Direct. Theirs is the only e-commerce site I've ever used where you can order goods online without giving an e-mail address. Bizzarely, they let you create a shopping basket and check out without having to register with their site, which is a separate function. Amtrak tried to deliver the parcel three times this week, each time at the same time when there was no-one home. I can't get to their depot, it's on some industrial estate that's completely inaccessible to me. Besides, they only hold uncollected parcels at the depot for two working days. I called them yesterday to reschedule delivery for today, but as the mere recipient I'm not important enough to be able to do that—it has to be authorised by the sender. Micro Direct are one of a large group of companies who seem to think that it's sufficient to have a contact form on their website, without actually having to respond to the e-mails it sends them. The DVD re-writer is going back to them and they're refunding my money. Once that happens, then I may try my luck for a third time at getting my hands on the latest LG DVD re-writer. This year my PC is getting nothing for Christmas. Hello GoodbyeSaturday, 01 January 2005Hello 2005, goodbye Microsoft. Don't worry, I haven't taken leave of my senses and ditched Windows for Linux at home—it's a fine server OS but I don't want it on my desktop. What I have done is finally ditch Internet Explorer and Outlook Express in favour of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. I'd been using the various versions of Outlook Express (and Internet Mail and News as it used to be called) for over six years and had successfully transferred my e-mail message store from my original PC to two successive computers. I'd also been using Internet Explorer as my primary browser since version 3.0 came out and swept all before it. Prior to that I'd used Netscape Navigator when I first got online. IE was pretty cool when it started to gain momentum, so I just stuck with it. The Netscape Communicator suite version 4.x was a dog compared to IE 5.x, so there was no reason to change. In recent years I knew that Microsoft's browser and e-mail offerings had serious deficiencies, which prompted me to take a look at Opera and the open-source Mozilla. I then got into a crazy situation whereby I was using three different Web browsers on a daily basis. I'd use Internet Explorer for most sites, because that's what came up when I pressed the Web button on my Microsoft keyboard, and I could never be bothered to re-program it. For certain discussion groups where I always wanted to look at the same set of related pages, I used Opera, because it let me save those pages as a group of tabs. And occasionally I'd use Mozilla when I wanted to check how hard-wired to IE a particular site was. The only add-in I used with IE was when I recently started to use the Google Toolbar to block pop-ups and to tell me the PageRank of pages on this site. I stuck with Outlook Express for e-mail and newsgroups because I was so familiar with it and because over the years I'd grown a complex hierarchy of 162 folders and associated message rules for routing e-mails into the appropriate folders! This coupled with the fact that I rarely delete non-spam e-mail, meant that any program I switched to had to import all this data flawlessly. I knew that the Microsoft software I was using had security flaws that were becoming increasingly regular, serious and publicised, but it didn't concern me because I'm careful about what I click on, use the holy triumvirate of firewall, anti-virus and spyware removal software, don't run as administrator and keep my data backed up. There was no flash of light moment of revelation when I suddenly decided to go Mozilla, all that happened was that I'd liked Firefox for a while and had downloaded version 1.0 and decided to give Thunderbird a spin too. And then I noticed that both products had eliminated the barriers that had prevented me switching. Firefox imported my IE favourites, cookies, browsing history and even any saved form and password data—probably an impressive piece of reverse-engineering as I doubt Microsoft document this—without any fuss whatsoever. Thunderbird too coped admirably with those 162 mail folders, my account settings and my 11,500-odd saved e-mails. Another factor that made me switch was that unlike a lot of open-source software, these products are slick to look at and use. They use attractive graphics, the user interfaces are well-thought out and the same is true of their respective websites.
I like the compactness of both programs. If there's a feature that you need, then simply bolt it on with an extension. I like the way that Firefox colours the location bar yellow when I'm using a secure site and I like its unobtrusive Find window, although this is taking me a while to get used to after six years of the IE way. Thunderbird shows some intelligence when I resize the columns in its folder view i.e. it tries to keep the information in the columns readable. Its built-in junk mail filtering is great and means that I can retire K9, the program that I was previously using as my anti-spam solution. I can also ditch OE-QuoteFix, another Outlook Express band-aid I was using. Software that leads to a simpler overall solution is a good thing in my book. One advantage Outlook Express does have over Thunderbird is that it makes it very easy to move the entire message store to a different location. Using Thunderbird I had to edit a few settings to move the message store from my Windows partition to my data partition. I'd also like a bit more maturity in the way Thunderbird handles the selection of sub-folders within a folder hierarchy; it's tedious having to select each sub-folder individually. There doesn't appear to be a way of going automatically to my Inbox upon program start-up that works, and a way of applying a default column sorting order to all folder views would be handy too. Also, I really miss having one command for receiving and sending e-mails. However, these are minor quibbles and I'm sure they'll all be addressed by future versions or by extensions. Firefox and Thunderbird are now my default Web browser and mail program respectively and I even finally got around to re-programming the buttons on that Microsoft keyboard. I have a feeling that 2005 is going to be a good year for Mozilla. Happy New Year! |
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