Silence of the Mind

QOTN last night., me addressing the house at large.
"Yeh, I'm brainfried and need something mindless to do, so I'm going to install XP and get that last PC he left rebuilt."

I've lost count of the number of times I've installed XP somewhere, as kokuten its as close to a meditative zen act as I get these days.

Well...I now have my computer operating at 100% for the first time in about 2 years.

Sometime in the last year and a half, the DVDRom drive died such that putting a disk in it would cause the system to hang till it timed out. Andwhen last I cracked the case, I reversed the floppy drive cable. These were both such low usage items that I've ignored them for the last 2 years or so. But, last night, since I had the case open...I replaced the DVDRom drive with a new one, and reversed the cable. At the same time i installed another 800GB of disk drive...and now have 1.25 TB of drive in my main workstation.

Hopefully this should last me another year or so, but at the pace Ive been shooting....who knows. :-)

One of the things I did with the new install, was cruise though Dell's support site and download all current drivers for my laptop. They don't make this model any more so this is likely to be the last time I need to do that. One side effect I discovered was with he drivers for the MiniPCI WiFi card in my laptop.

When I'm at the office(dayjob) and connected to the WAP there, I am now getting a steady solid 54-48Mb connection. Before the new drivers, I was getting 2 to 5Mb connections and a lot of the time dropping down to 1Mb and then no signal before coming back 10 or 20 minutes later.

I know I have a bad antenna in my laptop, but I would never have thought new drivers could give me THIS much of a performance gain...color me IMPRESSED(and pleased). Now to test distance and see how it works.

Well, it looks like my faithful Nexland SOHO router finally gave up the ghost after over 5 years of service. The connection here at the house has been getting worse and worse the last 2 weeks...there would be times I'd remote in, start a mail download(It appears I can't actually use my mail from the server until its been spam filtered any more...can't find the wheat from the chaff when I log in via webmail) and promptly get disconnected. And when I'd get back in a few minutes later...the mail download had timed out. Seemed like the simple act of using the connection more heavily than it had been would cause it to fall over. Its sorta like the switch problem we had a few months ago, except that this time rebooting the switch didn't help.

So, we swapped out the router last night, and once the new one was configured....boom...everything worked great. No more timeouts on every webpage, no more constant disconnects from IM, no more dropped remote sessions. Very nice. I guess I can't fault the router...its been working for at LEAST 5 years(none of us are sure just how long any more...its been that long) and I don't want to know how many terabytes of data have gone though it.

ahh...upgrades are always fun. Courtesy my IRS refund I splurged and got something frivolous and ordered a set of Bose QC2 Noise canceling headphones, and after seeing one at the last client I was at, I decided to get a shell for the 40GB laptop hard drive i had floating around. I also got some more RAM, so my workstation won't be bumping up against limits, and I can upgrade one of my DevBoxes for working with VMWare server here at the house.

So far the NC headset is nice, but the real test will be how it works on the plane. The 40GB drive will give me a second place to store photos besides on my laptop...a nice bit of insurance there.

Well...I took the MS 070-270 Installing, Configuring, and Administering XP client exam today. And much to my surprise, I passed(seriously, the questions were so oddly worded I was fully expecting to fail).

So, I'm now MS Certified to play with these XP boxes I've been running for the last 4 years. heh

2 down, 2 to go, then I'm an MCSA.

So I finally get around to installing the new hard drive I got for my laptop tonight. I was figuring I'd just pop the old laptop drive into a free computer and grab a ghost image of it since its a relatively recent build and I haven't been using my laptop enough to have messed it up much since i rebuilt it last. Put it into the first computer, and realize "shit..there's no floppy drive to use the network boot floppy in". Oops...
Then kokuten informs me that that PC has a dead FDD controller anyway so its moot. Shit. Next up, the uncased dev box in the dev cabinet. annnnnndddd strike two. Seems that between the two of us we managed to blow the motherboard or something.

I'm sorta irritated at this point..I really did need more space on my laptop. kokuten comments "You know...does Ghost have drivers for your laptop's NIC?" I stop and think and say "No, but I wonder if I can find some online for it." So I fire it up to see just what chipset its got in it...and I see a 3com 3C920(3C905-TX compatible). There's no way this could work....but I fire it up, and sure enough my generic 3C905 boot disk works perfectly. *shakes head* All that work and I could have just started with my laptop and ended there.

I have to admit to good timing though, when I fired up the ghost process it ran for a bit and I decided to go and do some stuff around the house and grab a shower. I get back to my computer and just as I'm looking to see the status of the ghost...it dings that its done. How's that for timing?