All Windows and No Play Makes hictio a Dull Boy

It has been a month already... Unbelievable... 

So far (and things haven't even really begun yet) I've learned a lot, but one thing remains unchanged... I hate Windows, what a fucking piece of shit OS it is.

A New Hopefully Hope

About to start a new job (on Monday), so, my employer sent me this laptop.
An all aluminum HP Elitebook, pretty nice, only fuckshit is that the keyboard is "in Spanish".
Fuck this shit.

HDD Swap For The GF

Another installment of the ongoing battle for switching the GF's Lenovo N585 from Windows 10 to Windows 7.
(Link 1 & Link 2).
Last Sunday, I had to install the old HDD (the one with Windows 10) on the lappie, so the GF can take out a couple of files that got left behind...

OS Update For The GF

Well, she isn't Cherry 2000, so, actually the OS update it is for her laptops...
Taken last Sunday afternoon...
Side by side, both of the GF lappies, getting an OS update/ refreshment.
On the left, the T410, jumping from Linux Mint 17 (Cinnamon) to Ubuntu 16.04 (plain vanilla Unity).
On the right, the Lenovo N585, going from Window 10 to Windows 7, it looks like Windows 10 was way too much for the lappie. or maybe it was because she did an upgrade from Windows 8 (which already was a bit slow) to Windows 10.

Upgrades During The Weekend

Took last Sunday to make some changes on the GF lappies.
Her Windows lappie, the Lenovo N585) was dog slow, so I pulled the HDD out, slapped another one I had around the house, and loaded a brand spanking new Windows 7 onto it.
Also, took the T410 and replaced the Linux Mint 17 install with a brand spanking new of Xenail, wiht Unity!
She loved it the interface, go figure, and the Desktop Environment choice of colors, go figure...
Also, of course, she loves the fact that now can use the Jam Trance Mini bluetooth speakers with the lappie.
Installing and setting up the Linux lappie was a breezy, ITOH, the Windows...
MF, what a drag! It took hours and more hours and more hours to setup, install updates, get shit done... Not to mention countless effing reboots...
Anyways, anything for the GF!

The Real Unknown

Just netflixed Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery.
The amazing Ken Burns documentary fills in -with amazing landscape cinematography- pretty well the Ambrose book I read almost 3 years ago.

Windows 7 on the Dell Inspiron 1000

Installed today, after playing yesterday with Linux Mint 12 on the same laptop.
Loaded a bigger HDD, in this case, a beast of 60 GB go figure, and a little more of RAM I found, maxxing the memory to 768 MB.
Installation went fine -following my own USB key instructions-, took about an hour (from a USB key), the only remarkable thing, after the installation was over, there was no NIC adapter listed (the laptop has only a NIC card, no builtin WiFi adapter).
Easily worked out after installing the first set of Updates, but, in order to do so had to use a PCI D-Link DWL-G630 WiFi card that got recognized out of of box open sticking it onto the PCI bay.



The Inspiron 1000 only has a 1024x768 LCD and a video card that is incapable of delivering Aero Desktop Effects, but nevertheless the screen seems clear enough to use day in day out, particularly the Chrome browser one.



Installed the Windows 7 email client, that, believe it or not, you have to actually download because Windows 7 doesn't include it, even tho it is called "Something or other Essentials"... It took forever to get all the necessary updates once that "Essential" was installed.



Next thing, maybe tomorrow, will be actually using that Windows Mail Essential, and get all my contacts imported onto that.

No sound for you!

The Realtek builtin sound card on Hercules wasn't detected by Windows 7 upon installation, but no biggie, after a couple of Windows Update it come out alive & kicking...

A bit of ye olde Windows (7)

Changed the hdd on Hercules and used a bit Windows 7 today...

So far this is, by a loooong shot, the Windows release that looks the best right out of the box.
Of course I had to install a ton of updates and reboot (after all I haven't used this Windows 7 since October 2010...) and the poor little Hercules has its fans constantly spinning to keep the beast happy with all the CPU it needs.

Windows 7 on a Sony Vaio PCG FRV37

So I got me a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate, if you can say that, to play with a bit.

Slap install that on the huge baby monster Vaio I have lying around for tests, got a 20 GB HDD that already had a working install of XP, and installed ontop of that, the Vaio can't boof from USB, and I had the Windows 7 installers on a USB stick (pirate, you say... Shame on you! This is research...)

Installed without any issue, it took about 3 hours, needless to say, on this ultra crappy and old laptop all that jazz and eye candy that Aero should provide doesn't run at all, but, nevertheless, I think that the default GUI is miles and miles ahead in terms of beautiful compared to what Vista was.

Windows 2003 & Intel PRO 1000

So the other day had to make a Windows installation, of a Server, if that can be true.
Haven't been quite a while since I performed a Windows installation, that is, a real one, not a virtualized in some way or another...
This was on a Dell PowerEdge 2850 server, not a top of the line one (by a long chance), but not a piece of crap server either, and really it is not that old.

Anyway, really great was my surprise when I finished the installation and I find out that there is NIC working, not one, at all.
I thought that I somehow screwed the pooch during the install, and that I have forgotten to add a "Windows Component", namely, the TCP/IP one; so I loaded up the installation CD, and checked it.
It was installed.

The thing is, the plain vanilla Windows installation did not installed the drivers for the damn NIC, an Intel PRO 1000, so I had to download the driver, copy it to a USB pen drive, and then transfer it to the PowerEdge.
Not a biggy of course, but really strange, given the nature of the whole thing (a commercial OS, on top of a Dell server), well, live and learn, maybe?

  

  



EDIT:
The people at Hotfile has deleted the file, it seems like it was breaking a copyright issue... SO, here is the link to the file, from the Intel site
Network Adapter Drivers for Windows Server 2003

Forced to use the Window

Today I had to use Windows.

Yes, I was forced to, just like that... And the worst of the whole thing is that it was to use a web app, from a GPL project.

Had to make some changes on one of the Zabbix servers from work and, to begin with, using Os X' Safari I was unable to login, it simply did not work, don't know what might have been the problem, but it was impossible to do accomplish that.

So I moved to Tango, to give it a shot, and test it with Ubuntu and Firefox, I was able to login without any problem, but, it was of no use, since the buttons showed no words at all, you had to guess what was the purpose of each one, or had a lot of memory.

Put a little fat onto the caret

I have what I should call a "thing" for mouse pointer shapes... ( link 1, link 2, link 3 ) I simply like them to be just the exact way I like them to be.

Found a way to customize that on firefox too, specially, the caret text cursor. You know, the little vertical bar that indicates where the next letter will appear when you are typing something.

With this your caret will get fatter and easier to see on the screen (well, at least on Firefoix' screen).

Making the caret more visible

Currently looking for a similar solution to do so on the Gnome desktop, globally.

Synergy drops

One thing I have noticed running Synergy with the server on Os X, and the client on Vista, is that if unplug the AC on the Vista side, and start to use on batteries, it starts to drop the connection, pretty, pretty often.
It doesn't matter how much battery left it has, the drops begins as soon as I unplug the AC.

I'm not sure, but I doubt that this is a Windows problem, I mean, the Compaq's WiFi NIC does work pretty well, with a very good signal strength all around, pretty much all the time.

Importing contacts from Outlook to Evolution

This was a totally Linux weekend around here, not Vista nor Os X, Ubuntu was all there was available, and, to feel more "at home" transfered some of the data from my other boxes...

Importing data, in this case, the contacts, is not hard at all, specially with the latest Evolution version, and on my case, super easy because I ise IMAP for all my email, so no need to tranfer all of them each time I access my email forma another box.

But, it seems like I have done something wrong, because ended up with a lot of duplicates (actually cuadriplicates) for each of my contact.
So, to get things back on track, what I did was:

1- Close Evolution.
2- Move the wrong Address Book data files out of the way:

cd ~/.evolution/addressbook/local/system/
mv * ~/Desktop/

3- Start Evolution again, and then re-import the Contacts.

To transfer the actual Contacts from Outlook itself, I choose the "CSV route", on the Windows box imported all the Contacts to a CSV file, copied that to the Linux box, and then, on Evolution, selected:

1- File -> Import
2- Click on Forward
3- Select "Import a single file" -> Forward
4- Filename, navigate to the contacts.CSV file that you created on the Windows box.
5- Select "Outlook CSV or Tab" -> Forward
6- Import Location, select "Personal" -> Forward
7- Wait till imports everything.

This worked perfectly for me, on the latest Evolution that comes with Ubuntu, and the imported data from an Outlook 2002.
There are other ways, that involved programs (for Windows) like Outport, or using Thunderbird as middle man; again, as I don't have the need to export the actual emails, I did not find a need for using those, tested Outport to transfer the Calendar, but that is another subject :D

Zip on Vista: sucks

Yeap, just like that, it takes for ever to unzip files, I don't know why, and this has been like this from day one, apparently, the Service Pack 1 should have taken care of this... But, I did install the Service Pack, and I haven't noticed any improvement whatsoever.

I mean, take a look at the screenshot... 4 minutes and a half to unzip an 800 KB file... That's like way too much...

Outlook gripes

Being using Windows Vista for about 5 months now.
So far, and spite all I heard about it, I find it to work well, be stable, and useful; and, it doesn't look that bad.

My only gripe it is not with Vista per se, but I really find Outlook to be a piece of sh*t, maybe it is the version I have (Outlook 2002), I'm not sure, but I haven't found an email client as unstable as Outlook in quite a while, perhaps it is because I use IMAP, every email I get, which is bigger than 3 MB makes Outlook stutters, if not completely freeze for a couple of minutes.

And there is, of course, the not so rare total crash...

Outlook: color coding emails

Most of the work emails I get are from other machines, and many, many of those are from a Nagios instance running on some Linux box somewhere.
So, I can easily predict what an email from a given machine, reporting such and such thing, would look like.
On all my boxes I had my email client with some sort of color coding setup to differentiate emails from difference importance, origin, etc, etc.

I did the same on the Outlook 2002 I have on my Vista laptop Tango, I can't believe how complicated the whole thing is on Outlook, I mean, for such a stupid thing as adding color based on the sender or a keyword on the subject...
I'll post the screen shots here, in case I have to do this again with more rules, or to edit the current colors.

Go to 'View' -> 'Current View' -> 'Customize'




Click on 'Add', set a name for the rule, and the click on 'Condition' to set the email address or the keyword to set the color of the email.

The upgrade that never was

A nice thing about upgrading other people's (as well as your own's) computers is that you inevitably end up with a lot of spare hardware, the bad thing is the given hardware usually is a piece of crap.
Like, for instance, this case, my mother's laptop has a really, really amount of RAM, 256 MB, and even XP crawls with that.

So, I tried to maxx up that RAM, but any of the RAM sticks I have work... That laptop needs, ideally, this RAM kit, while, what I had to offer was this one, or this one.

BTW, that Acer is really a piece of sh*t. All silvery plastic (that rubs off at the palm rest), lightweight, yes, but a fragile feeling all around to; and the bundled software... Boy, that sucks... A lot (and I mean a LOT). A whole lot of Acer crapware pre-installed; the nice thing it has is the keyboard.

Tango, now on Cinerama!

Hooked up my HUGE monitor to Tango, just for kicks... Strange I haven't thought of this before, but never mind.
Vista seems rather cool with this amount of screen real state.