Technology – Page 12

PC Madness Continued

I lost most of this weekend to the ongoing drama of my computer upgrade. On Saturday FedEx delivered not one, but two replacement motherboards. The vendor screwed up again. Now I have to pay to ship yet another piece of hardware I didn’t need.

At any rate, I shut down the old PC and started putting the new PC together. After assembling the old and new parts into the new PC case and powering it up, we experienced exactly the same problem with the secondary IDE controller.

Thinking that one busted mobo was bad luck, but two was not likely, Scott did a little more research and found on person reporting that unplugging the cable that powered the two USB ports on the front of their PC case solved the secondary IDE problem. We tried it and poof! Problem gone. It’s a little annoying to have plugs that can’t be used, but it’s not a deal breaker at this point because I only have 3 USB devices, one of which is rarely used, and there are 4 other working USB plugs on the back of the case. And right now I just want a working PC.

That leaves the next problem — the boot device BSOD we keep getting even though the system is seeing the CD just fine now. Scott fiddles and announces that it must be something relating to the CD drivers. I had trouble following his explanation, frankly. Whatever the problem is, it’s way beyond my level of ability to solve. He thinks that we might be able to fix it if we reinstall Windows 2000. Fine by me. Except when we did so, we discovered that my lovely HDs (the ones with about 40GB of programs and data) were the problem, not the CD. For reasons as yet unknown, the new system does not think they’re bootable, and Windows 2000 wants to reformat them before it will reinstall. This makes no sense to me because they were working perfectly well on the old setup and if you boot to a floppy, you can then CD to the drives and read them just fine. But they cannot be booted to now.

All along, I’ve made life more difficult on this upgrade because I did not want to reinstall my system. But now it seems that the one thing I most did not want to do is what I have to do.

To avoid having to reformat the HDs and totally lose my stuff, Scott pulls out a 70 GB hard drive that’s currently not in use, puts it into the new case, and starts installing Windows XP onto it. I then spend most of the rest of the weekend bit by bit reinstalling and reconfiguring some 30+ applications and deciding whether to reinstall another 20 or so. Some of them I haven’t used in a while but I like to have them just in case.

The only thing that kept me from screaming and throwing things is that I did not lose any data. Between the old HDs, my iPod, the backup CD I burned before starting all this, and my Tungsten C, I have a good copy, if not two copies, of all documents, files, MP3s, photos, fonts, bookmarks, etc.

I’m not quite done yet but the worst is over this Monday morning. My system is more or less looking how I like it and is running noticeably faster; and when I finally reinstalled the game that started this whole mess – City of Heroes – it ran smoothly and looks great. So in that sense I suppose it was all worthwhile. But still, I am not a very happy camper about the whole thing.

Here’s the new configuration, if you’re curious:
Antec case
Asus P4S800 motherboard
Intel P4 2.8 GHz CPU
2 512MB DIMMs
ATI Radeon 9600SE video
Creative SB sound card (old)
FireWire card
70GB Maxtor drive
Windows XP SP2

Hopefully I won’t have to go through this for another couple of years.

10 Things I Hate About Building PCs

I’m sure I’ll get a bunch of smarmy comments from the Mac contingent over this, but I’m currently in the middle of a PC upgrade fiasco, and I need to get it off my chest.

I really like the new City of Heroes game, but unfortunately the PC I use, a homebuilt box, does a lousy job of running the game. The graphics card I have (a Radeon All In One) isn’t quite powerful enough, but due to the age of the motherboard, I can’t upgrade to a better graphics card without also upgrading the motherboard. Which means buying a new case and power supply, because the 4-year-old case won’t hold newer motherboards. And at that point you might as well go to 512MB of memory and upgrade the processor. Now you’re up to $500 worth of new hardware to run a $50 game.

Scott suggested new hard drive(s) as well but I drew the line there. And I decided that since I have so much free time right now, I was going to be the primary builder of the new box. I’m about 4 times as slow as Scott when it comes to hardware installation, but with him working and me not, it seems unfair to make him do it all.

That all leads us to the point of this post, which is a list of the 10 things I most hate about building your own PC:

Despite the huge pile of PC hardware in our office, some of it up to 7 years old, none of it is actually useful
There is no easy way to grab onto PCI cards when you’re trying to take them out of their slots, resulting in cuts on your fingers
Instruction manuals on the one hand omit key pieces of information yet offer pages of useless drivel on the other hand
Power supplies, whose huge masses of cables block critical space inside the PC case, don’t have enough plugs of the kind that you need and too many if the kind that you don’t need
I don’t get why you need 6 different kinds of screws to put one PC together
Operating systems that give a BSOD on boot-up if the CD drive isn’t found suck
Motherboards with secondary IDE controllers that don’t work out of the box or even after you’ve updated the BIOS also suck
Resellers who ship motherboards that have non-functioning secondary IDE controllers suck even more than that
Planned Obsolescence in general, for being the root cause of the entire fiasco
Having to do it all over again when the (hopefully fully functional) new motherboard gets here some time in the next few days

Friendster: About Face!

This is exactly the kind of action that makes people have no respect for what corporations say: Friendster, which has made much of its ‘no fake profiles’ policy, is now allowing fake profiles as long as they’re sponsored by a paying advertiser.

From its earliest days, many Friendster members introduced fake profiles — known variously as fakesters, or pretendsters — into their networks of friends. Often, members posted profiles of their pets and linked to friends’ pets. But the service quickly demonstrated it didn’t see the humor when it began purging the network of the fakesters.

Yet now, the company sees little irony in cooperating with Anchorman developer DreamWorks in introducing the movie’s characters into the Friendster network. In fact, it says the move is indicative of a larger cross-promotional plan the company has undertaken.

“What Friendster is doing with these movie-character profiles is actually a brand-new paradigm in media promotion,” Friendster spokeswoman Lisa Kopp said. “We are working directly with a number of production houses and movie studio partners to create film-character profiles, or ‘fan’ profiles, that allow our users to share their enthusiasm about the film with their friends.”

The message I get is that Friendster is tone-deaf to how this looks to their customers. Why is it not OK to put up a profile for a (real) pet bird but OK to have a profile of a fake anchorman for a not very funny summer movie? Oh right, money.

It’s been widely reported that all of the ‘social networking’ companies are having an issue trying to figure out how to make them profitable. This is one way of generating income that doesn’t require a full-out pay for content model, and in that sense it’s not a bad idea. But the hypocrisy inherent in the process does leave a bad taste in my mouth.

I’m probably not their target customer anyway. I signed onto Friendster a year or so ago. I was familiar with the “fakesters” on Friendster, even linked as a friend to the Howard Dean profile. As the Wired article mentions, it was a way of establishing community and saying something about myself by my choice of association. But ultimately, I gave up on Friendster and stopped visiting. The site was too static, didn’t really allow for much interaction – in short, I found it boring.

I prefer Orkut, which has user-formed community groups and message boards – much more interactive, much more interesting. It’s not a major part of my online activities, but unlike Friendster, Orkut is interesting enough for me to keep visiting & contributing to the site. Orkut is also invite-only, which helps keep the trolls out.

You've Got Spam!

AOL engineer with his head up his butt sells 92 million AOL screen names to spammers. More info here.

The only good news is at least somebody got caught. Too bad for the customers, whose addresses have probably been sold and resold a whole bunch of times since then.

Ignorant Luddities Strike Again

Or at least they’re trying to. Senator Orrin Hatch has introduced a bill to the Senate which is worded in such a way that it would not only make Kazaa illegal, but also TiVo, the CD burner in your computer, and even VCRs and cassette recorders illegal.

News.com reports that:

The proposal, called the Induce Act, says “whoever intentionally induces any violation” of copyright law would be legally liable for those violations, a prohibition that would effectively ban file-swapping networks like Kazaa and Morpheus. In the draft bill seen by CNET News.com, inducement is defined as “aids, abets, induces, counsels, or procures” and can be punished with civil fines and, in some circumstances, lengthy prison terms.

“Induce” stands for “Inducement Devolves into Unlawful Child Exploitation,” making this yet another example of cloaking wildly restrictive legislation in the mantle of “save the children!”. Because of course, it’s all about keeping kids away from porn. Never mind that adults would have to throw away every recording device in their homes to make it work.

The good news? Even if this lame excuse for a bill were to actually pass both houses and be signed into law, I doubt it would stand, because the Supreme Court said in 1984 that VCRs are legal devices. But still, it’s annoying to have to fight the same battles over and over again.

No More Clies

According to Brighthand, Sony is getting out of the PDA business.

I had trouble understanding why Sony felt the need to push so many new Clie models out the door so quickly, so I’m not surprised by the rumors of flat profitability. I’m sure there’s lessons to be learned for other PDA manufacturers. But it’s tough to spin this as even remotely a Good Thing for
the Palm Economy.

It’s also a bummer for me & Scott. We’ve owned 3 Clie models over the past few years, and I loved my 760C so much that I bought a second one when the original was stolen.