Category: Computers

This week I took Mom’s old “Dell” (actually a Compaq) home and erased the hard drive so that the computer could be junked. She didn’t want me to take it home because she knew it would just end up in my junk room with other obsolete stuff that I haven’t thrown away. I told her that every now and then there would be places set up where computers could be recycled. Unfortunately, they had just had one in Dekalb and I missed it. She called the next day and said she had heard on Clark Howard that you could turn in old computers at the Atlanta stadium today. I dug up my oldest Dell (bought in 1996), which was the one that Mom and Dad used for a few years. It had two hard drives in it. One was 1.6 GB and the other was 5.6 GB. As I had done with the Compaq, I took out the hard drive and connected it to my Dell so that I could format the drive, load it up with junk files (TV episodes) and then format it again. The 1.6 GB drive made a loud clicking when it spun up, so I could access it. Then I just put the hard drives back in the computers, but not connected.

Anyway, I drove down to the stadium at about noon. They were very organized with a lot of volunteers that directed me to a group of people who quickly removed everything I had and then I just drove off. It was almost like getting a pit stop. In no time they had hauled off three computers (my old Dell, the Compaq, and Susan’s old computer), two Dell CRT monitors (one 15″ and one 17″), and two old Powerbooks, the 520c and the 5300c. The 5300 was all dissembled and in a bag after my failed attempt to convert it to an electronic picture frame.

A lot of electronics like this are shipped overseas where the parts are separated as much as possible and the metal extracted (copper, steel, lead, tiny amounts of gold and other precious metals) or the glass melted down (from CRT monitors).

I still have my new laptop, my 3-year-old Dell desktop, and its precursor (from 2000) which I have set up as kind of a media center so that I can play iTunes through my stereo (though I don’t use it hardly ever).

I haven’t been using Linux much lately. But I was still looking forward to the release of the new version, 8.04 Hardy Heron. I had been running 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. I was wondering how they would jump from version 7.10 to 8.04, but I realized today that the version numbers are just the year and month of the release.

Last night I started doing an upgrade rather than a clean installation. My installation has gotten a little more buggy than usual lately, asking me for my password for a keyring when I boot up. I probably should have gone with a clean install, but with all the trouble I went through last time getting the wireless drivers set up, I thought I’d try the upgrade. It went fairly smoothly, but on my low-speed DSL line there were still a couple of hours of downloads. After watching fairly closely the first 15 or 20 minutes, I went to bed while it downloaded and installed stuff. In the middle of the night, as I was letting the dogs out, I checked how it was going. The computer had gone to sleep for some reason and I wound up rebooting. But the installer recovered nicely and this morning, after clicking a couple of dialog boxes, the installation was complete.

Although all of these upgrades had been downloaded wirelessly (the wireless bitrate for G is about the same as my DSL speed), when I rebooted, it no longer would connect with the network. I checked the settings and it was detecting the network, just not connecting, so the drivers seemed to still be working. Eventually I changed the security protocol from generic WPA to TKIP and re-entered my password. It hooked right up when I did that.

I also downloaded the clean installation and creating a boot disk went much smoother when using Roxio at work than it had using Sonic at home. All I had to do was double-click the ISO file and then make sure I clicked “Make bootable disk” and I had a bootable disk. Last time it took me 5 disks to get that right.

Continue reading “Linux, Part 4”

For the post on the Williamsburg trip I wanted to take the pictures that Mom and Carol had taken and shrink them down to something appropriate for a web page. I also wanted to handle all of the pictures as a batch, so I didn’t have to open each one individually, resize it, and then save again. I visited download.com and found a highly rated (5 stars by the editors, 4.5 stars by the users) free image editor called FastStone Image Viewer that can handle batch conversions like that. I believe this is the same viewer that I had loaded on Susan’s computer when I had to crop some files. With my copy of Lview Pro (shareware I paid for in the 90’s) getting pretty old, lately I’ve been using the very basic image editor that comes with Microsoft Office, but with the switch to Office 2007, they ruined the program. For instance, I don’t even know how to use it to open a picture file. The obvious menu location, File:Open, is not available.

FastStone is kind of complicated for what it does with some funky screens and previews. But after making copies of the pictures I wanted to use on the gallery web page in a single folder, FastStone made new copies in a subfolder that were resized perfectly.

Last year I bought Kaspersky Internet Security 6.0. I was really happy with it because it wasn’t that intrusive and didn’t use a lot of system resources. It was also pretty easy to configure. So when Fry’s offered a 3-license version of KIS 7.0 for free after rebates, I jumped on it. The first install I tried was on Mom’s laptop. She said it brought her computer to a crawl and uninstalled it. One nice thing about Kaspersky is that it is pretty easy to uninstall. I was disappointed, but if Mom said it was no good, then that was the case (maybe more memory will help Mom’s computer).

Continue reading “Kaspersky – Ugh”

I couldn’t get rid of the partition I had freed up for Ubuntu. So I thought I would try one more time with a clean installation. I also noticed on the page of lengthy instructions (from Linux, Part 2) that it was for the Dell 1390 wireless card and I checked and I had the 1395 wireless card. So I reran everything, only this time I downloaded the driver file R174291.exe instead of what the instructions told me. Worked like a charm!

Yeah, it still took a really long time to get everything to download and install, but I am writing this post wirelessly on the Vostro 1400 on Ubuntu.

Continue reading “Linux, Part 3”