What’s the matter with the OS I’m using?
“Can’t you tell that your Window’s too wide?”
Maybe I should buy some old Sidekick?
“Welcome back to the age of hive.
Where have you been hiden’ out lately, Sam?
You can’t throw trash till you spend a lot of RAM.”
Everybody’s talkin’ ‘bout the new GUI,
Funny, but it’s still NT to me.
I took an extra long vacation this winter, from Dec 22 until Jan 4. I needed that many days so I’d have some undisturbed time to reinstall XP on my home computer. This is just one of the normal rituals necessary when using the world’s most popular operating system. Historically, I’ve done it every year or two, once the computer gets painfully slow and unreliable.
I managed to go almost 3 years without having to do it. My machine just got slower, and slower, and less reliable. I couldn’t hear sound on YouTube (big loss, there), the slot wouldn’t read CF cards from my DSLR, a couple peripherals wouldn’t work in some USB ports, strange install scripts would kick off for no apparent reason. It’s a weirdness that gives Microsoft products their own special random charm.
A reinstall is when you hope you know where you’ve put everything on your PC, you open up the box, you hose out the 2 inches of dust that the 4 fans collected, you put in new drives that will hold another 6 months of RAW files, you reinstall Windows, and then you do your best to restore all your data (neatly ruining useful meta data). Once you are sure it is running correctly, and is faster and more reliable than it has ever been, you spend a solid two days carefully reinstalling all your software, just to slow it all back down again and introduce random errors and internal conflicts.
Then you spend a couple weeks reinstalling the stuff that you didn’t know you didn’t have.
Windows is especially challenging because you can’t just pick up stuff and move it. Unlike Apple’s OS, Linux, Xenix, Unix, and other efficient, reliable, and easily-administered computer operating systems, Microsoft consistently avoided design facilitating intuitive decisions about system operation. With a normal OS, if you want to move somebody’s files, you just pick them up and move them. If you want to move an application, you pick it up and move it. If you want to delete temporary files, you delete them. Windows just throws all that stuff together–in three entirely different places, one of which is not visible to mortals. You can’t just move it–you need to do a planned migration.
How did this happen, you might ask? Well, it is actually very simple: (more…)
I’ve spent most of the evening trying to upload 20 pictures from my high school reunion to Facebook. Processing the pictures was easy–I use Lightroom and once I got the RAW files into the correct directory on my Vosonic drive, it only took about 15 minutes to change color balance, exposure, and cropping. Then it got interesting.
My corporate laptop, due for upgrade, is peculiarly challenged with server side scripts. I don’t know what the technical explanation for this is–if there can even be one. I just find web-based applications as being especially conducive to data loss. Not being able to login to www.facebook.com directly thru my corporate laptop (nor my personal email), I finally got the pictures online by logging into my home computer, using www.logmein.com. After establishing that I didn’t have any probs connecting into logmein, I mailed a zipped folder full of pictures to my home account, and then loaded them into Facebook thru my home desktop, the screen of which is conveniently scraped off and presented to me thru Logmein. Neither Rube Goldberg nor Heath Robinson could have come up with a more convoluted path from my DSLR to my Facebook photo directory.
This is the penalty I pay after a week that started off reasonably well on the PC front. It had been 11 months since my last visit to Ohio, and Dad had a laundry list of things for me to do on his PC. I won’t go into gory details on why his laptop had 3 portable hard drives hanging off of it like suckling digital piglets. A quick trip to the computer superstore and a couple hours of consolidating files resulted in a single external drive for photos, with a second only attached as a backup. That hardware triumph was followed by a software success, reconfiguring his copy of Lightroom, and importing approximately 11,000 photos. All of it must have worked, because he’s been merrily keywording photographs for 2 days now.
After struggling mightily to actually write and save my last posting using the www.wordpress.com software I’d installed on my new web site (you can blame it on my laptops aversion to php if you want), I decided to experiment with a new blog client called www.zoundryraven.com. Once I established that it actually seemed to work (connecting itself to my blogging account in record time), I installed it on a memory stick running www.portableapps.com. If you can read this, then it must have worked.
Assuming it keeps working, I can plug my USB stick into any of the 4 laptops that my family is taking to Heiser Hollow next week, write a blog posting, and then upload it by pushing a button. Given this week’s lack of online success, I’m thinking that web-based apps at dial-up modem speed just aren’t going to cut it.