Dizwell

Bad things allegedly come in threes. Let’s hope it sticks to that number, at least approximately.

Problem No. 1: new mobile phones are obtained and I foolishly tell The Other Half, ‘No problems: I’ll use the Nokia software to backup your existing contacts/appointments/etc and then restore them to the new phone’. The first part of this plan goes well: backup of existing mobile works fine. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t have a happy ending: insert USB cable into new phone and watch Vista blue screen instantly by way of response (something I’ll confess to never having seen before). No problem, thinks computer genius. Just reboot, and it’ll be fine… but no. Three blue screens later, I give that plan up. Funnily enough, Vista seems to have the same ideas, as it decides not to boot up thereafter.

Problem No. 2: I don’t like Vista anyway, and the TOH has never been that keen either way, so if Vista can’t cope with Nokia, maybe a reinstalled XP Pro will. This PC has to have specially customised installation media created, however -it uses SATA Raid and doesn’t have a floppy drive, so you can’t press F6 during a normal installation and install additional drivers. Nothing Nlite can’t work its way around, though… and it lets me slipstream the new Service Pack 3, too, so that should let me cut a few corners. Strangely, however, this particular install fails to detect half the hardware I know to be in this PC. So I go back to an XP SP2 install disk and try again. Things work fine until I plug in the USB wireless network card, at which point the machine locks up completely. So I go back to an “XP circa 2001 no Service Pack at all” installation, and spend hours building the thing up carefully, making sure each piece works before trying the next. Then I install the network drivers and the thing just locks up once more. I actually installed XP 18 times that day, and in the end… nothing worked properly. In desperation, I tentatively mention to TOH that I could try Ubuntu 8.04 and see how it gets on, otherwise it’ll have to be the purchase of an entirely new PC. Faced with a choice between about $1000 and a freebie OS, TOH does the only logical thing and tells me to try an Ubuntu install. Said Ubuntu install goes fine, everything just works and TOH is sort-of happy (though having to unlearn Microsoft Money and Flight Simulator is not a happy prospect). The screensavers are, apparently, very good, though! A virtual machine running XP has no problem using the Nokia software to bring the new mobile up to the same state of data chaos as I detected (but couldn’t say) the original was in to start with. So TOH is happy that the new, sexy (and weirdly heavy, I have to say) mobile is now working OK, and ‘that Ubuntu must be quite good to be able to do that when Windows couldn’t.’ Indeed.

Problem No. 3: My main PC suddenly decides that when rebooting it will pause for five minutes on the POST screen, displaying the word “memory” but not actually counting any of it. Then, after a complete standstill for about five minutes, it will boot as if nothing at all was the matter. Everything works fine, but reboots are a time-wasting no-no. A casual chat with my System Administrator colleague Nathan and he says, ’sounds like disk drive problems to me’. I take this to mean, ‘You really ought to buy those new terabyte hard disks you’ve been thinking about for so long’, so I do. Remove all the former 500GB drives and replace them with the new 1TB drives and bingo! -no more trouble booting up. Whether the problem was actually the 500GB drives or not is irrelevant, I suppose. I now have terabytes coming out of my ears (metaphorically speaking, and this makes me happy). However, then the laptop pops its clogs (it must be sun spots, surely?!) and I am left internet-less until I manage to bring it back from the dead. That one doesn’t, strangely, involve the use of Ubuntu, but it has nevertheless “regressed” to using XP having had 2 months of using Vista Basic without too much undue incident.

Meanwhile, at work, all the webservers keep crashing (not my problem, happily) and all the database servers suddenly start suffering intermittent ORA-04031 errors (definitely my problem, sadly).

In short, for the past two weeks, anything that could go technologically wrong, at home and at work, has -and most times, I haven’t even needed to be present for it to happen, which is slightly unusual. Hence the hiatus in posting here, anyway.

Suspicious minds might note that as a result of these compounded difficulties, I am now running an almost completely Ubuntu household with functional new mobile phones and an extra terabyte or two of hard disk space to play with. Extremely suspicious minds might also note that an at least plausibly good case has been made for replacing an ageing ultra-portable laptop with something a lot more sexy and modern. A $20,000 cheque received from the tax office a week ago, by way of my finally deciding to submit tax returns for the past ten years, encourages me in the belief that at least a new 9″ eeePC might be mine for the asking, for example…

Less suspicious minds should simply note that Vista has no place in this household, though XP still does, and Ubuntu is my new OS flavour du mois (or at least, du jour).