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computer resurrection
My main computer was sick for some time before moving to Queensland, then soon after arriving it stopped altogether. That turned out to be a bung power supply. I replaced it and I had my sick machine working again... after a fashion. Unfortunately it just got more and more ill.
I had been backing up all of drive C and most of drive D (hadn't got to drive E yet) and after 32 CDROMs I realised that the backups didn't save all the deeper folders. *sigh* So I bit the bullet and decided to wipe my windows installation in as minimally intrusive a way as possible so that I could start afresh. You normally can't delete the Windows folder and subfolders from in Windows or DOS, but I rebooted to DOS and used the Free Software Foundation Unix-like tools to do the job. It was very simple. The astonishing thing is that after re-installing windows I found that I had about an extra 1.5Gb on my hard drive!!!
Some while ago I'd scrolled through an online book on all the info that MSWindows stealthily stores on your machine. This guy was saying that it hides an unbelievable amount in folders that it pretends are empty -- if you look in them under Windows they appear to be empty when in fact they may contain huge amounts of data. At the time I thought it was a bit too paranoid, and I didn't really believe they'd be able to store that much info anyway -- it would take up too much space... perhaps 1.5Gb on a machine that is heavily used over the last couple of years??? Well I believe it now. I deleted nothing but the Windows folder. Then I installed Windows fresh again and much of my programs. I don't let many sites store cookies -- just LJ and one or two others, and I make sure they are limited in time to just a fortnight. My temp folder is on my F drive as is the Windows swap file. The only explanation I can come up with for that freed 1.5Gb is sneaky Windows storing info on what I have been doing for the last few years. Anybody can't find the ebook I'll send it to you.
Anyway, while re-installing my software I remembered that I had the Palm upgrade for its operating system, so I thought this was a perfect time to install it too. It involved reprogramming the flash ROM on my Palm. Rubbing my hands together with anticipation I tried my new, upgraded Palm... and it crashed. It wouldn't run any of the standard ROM-based programs. I tried to revert to the old OS, but the older flash utilities wouldn't let me because I was now using an unknown OS! There was nothing online about my problem so it was not a common occurrence. Eventually (after a couple of days), I worked out that the difficulty might lie in one of the programs I had on the Palm. I uninstalled all but the standard set and it worked fine! Now I worked through them, installing and uninstalling them till I isolated the problem: a program to display the periodic table of elements. Somehow, without even being run, it was crashing my Palm. It was a nice program and I'll miss it, but my Palm now runs again. Yay!
Now I just have to solve my modem problem. The modem on my main machine doesn't like my ISP so I have to do all my online stuff from my laptop. Well, I'll fix it in time.
I am almost all back to normal here.
I had been backing up all of drive C and most of drive D (hadn't got to drive E yet) and after 32 CDROMs I realised that the backups didn't save all the deeper folders. *sigh* So I bit the bullet and decided to wipe my windows installation in as minimally intrusive a way as possible so that I could start afresh. You normally can't delete the Windows folder and subfolders from in Windows or DOS, but I rebooted to DOS and used the Free Software Foundation Unix-like tools to do the job. It was very simple. The astonishing thing is that after re-installing windows I found that I had about an extra 1.5Gb on my hard drive!!!
Some while ago I'd scrolled through an online book on all the info that MSWindows stealthily stores on your machine. This guy was saying that it hides an unbelievable amount in folders that it pretends are empty -- if you look in them under Windows they appear to be empty when in fact they may contain huge amounts of data. At the time I thought it was a bit too paranoid, and I didn't really believe they'd be able to store that much info anyway -- it would take up too much space... perhaps 1.5Gb on a machine that is heavily used over the last couple of years??? Well I believe it now. I deleted nothing but the Windows folder. Then I installed Windows fresh again and much of my programs. I don't let many sites store cookies -- just LJ and one or two others, and I make sure they are limited in time to just a fortnight. My temp folder is on my F drive as is the Windows swap file. The only explanation I can come up with for that freed 1.5Gb is sneaky Windows storing info on what I have been doing for the last few years. Anybody can't find the ebook I'll send it to you.
Anyway, while re-installing my software I remembered that I had the Palm upgrade for its operating system, so I thought this was a perfect time to install it too. It involved reprogramming the flash ROM on my Palm. Rubbing my hands together with anticipation I tried my new, upgraded Palm... and it crashed. It wouldn't run any of the standard ROM-based programs. I tried to revert to the old OS, but the older flash utilities wouldn't let me because I was now using an unknown OS! There was nothing online about my problem so it was not a common occurrence. Eventually (after a couple of days), I worked out that the difficulty might lie in one of the programs I had on the Palm. I uninstalled all but the standard set and it worked fine! Now I worked through them, installing and uninstalling them till I isolated the problem: a program to display the periodic table of elements. Somehow, without even being run, it was crashing my Palm. It was a nice program and I'll miss it, but my Palm now runs again. Yay!
Now I just have to solve my modem problem. The modem on my main machine doesn't like my ISP so I have to do all my online stuff from my laptop. Well, I'll fix it in time.
I am almost all back to normal here.