Via here, a 1950s tale of 1950s societal conformity gone horribly…amusing.
One last brief commentary on computer upgrading, and then I swear to you I will talk to you about something that isn’t my computer – squirrels, or snow, or something. If you’re well and truly done with computing, go check out the lengthy political discussion at Samson’s blog.
For the rest of you, a couple observations.
1. So it turns out that all of my stability errors were pretty much due to the third RAM slot on my motherboard being bad, which was…bad. Switched everything out, works great. I am abreviating 3 hours of RAM testing here, which was actually kind of fun because of the oldschool ASCII interface and the blinking sequence of \ . / to make it seem like it was doing a * sort of move.
2. So I’m pretty well ok with Vista so far. It does the things I need it to do, and does them in a mostly non-annoying fashion, and it is shiny. There are two main exceptions to this:
- UAC, which is as I said annoying, although as I may have also said, it is somewhat harder to be annoyed when the picture you see is of a very sad and pensive kitten that really just needs a hug, but will tentatively settle for your administrator password. It may later want my credit card number, but we’re not that far in the relationship yet.
- Games Explorer, which is supposed to provide you with a one stop shop for all your games, giving you box art, version numbers, and all sorts of information, and may also make you waffles, all of which are fine ideas that I can get behind. The whole thing looks like this:
Looks fine and all, except when you realize that there are 27 games in that list. 10 of them are Windows games, the others are stuff I installed. What you don’t see are the other 15 or so games that didn’t show up, which is to say that autodetection and addition of games is spotty, to say the least, and very uneven – Morrowind made it, but Oblivion did not. Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault made it, Medal of Honor: Airborne, a newer game, did not.
Fortunately, you can add games manually, only there’s one problem – you can’t actually update any of the information, which is utterly beyond my comprehension. Fortunately, there exist workarounds, including a tool called Vista Games Explorer Editor, that allow you to fix that. Drag your shortcut into Games Explorer, run VGEE, go find your game on allgame.com, download the box art, and manually edit everything. Short, but kind of onerous, and completely unnecessary, and there are a couple of things, such as ESRB, you just can’t touch.
Great idea, MS, but your implementation sucks.
In case you ever find yourselves wanting pepper steaks, but can’t find Durkee’s black peppercorn marinade, and instead think you should just sub in the better part of a bottle of ground black peppercorns, I encourage you not to do this. The outcome is wildly unoptimal. You have been warned.
Brought to you by this picture here, which is a movie of a bear frolicing in water as my Windows Vista background:
One more story in the continuing saga of computer death and rebirth, as discussed here, here, here, and here, and in the tradition of the upgrade stories of yore here, here, and here, I present to you…an upgrade story.
The old computer at time of death:
PSU – 420W Enermax
Motherboard – Chaintech somethingoratother
CPU – AMD somethingoratother 3.2 Ghz
RAM – 2 GB G.Skill DDR2
Video – EVGA GeForce 6800 GS w/256 MB
Sound – Soundblaster Audigy 2
Hard Drives – 1xWestern Digital 320 GB, 1xWestern Digital 250 GB, 1x Seagate Freeagent Pro 1 TB external
Media Drives – 1x TDK 40x CD burner (2001 vintage), 1x LG 40x DVD burner, 1x 3.25″ floppy (1996 vintage)
New computer:
PSU – 610W PC Power & Cooling
Motherboard – Gigabyte EP45-UD3LR
CPU – Intel Core 2 Duo 3.0 Ghz
RAM – 4 GB G.Skill DDR2
Video – EVGA GeForce 260 GTX w/896MB
Sound – Realtek onboard sound
Hard Drives – 2x Samsung 750 GB, 1x Seagate Freeagent Pro 1 TB external
DVD Drives – 2x LG 42x DVD burners
Both of which, as well as the 2002 computer before them, live(d) in a Lian-Li PC-61 black aluminum midtower case, the virtues of which I have extolled at length previously, but let me just say again that Lian-Li cases are awesome, and you ought to use them.
I’d like to tell you how exciting this upgrade process was in terms of hardware, but I’m apparently getting better at these things, because it wasn’t, particularly. I put a couple of new case fans in, cleaned it thoroughly, and then started throwing hardware in. There’s a certain level of mess involved, of course:
Which is actually prior to the DVD drives showing up and adding their mess, but yknow.
About the only hiccup was getting the CPU cooling fan on the motherboard. I keep forgetting how you have to beat on those things to get them on, and every time I do it, I say “Man, that was hard!” However, I triumphed, and ultimately ended up with this:
Which is the case pre-DVD drives, which went up in the top front, and did so fairly easily. I also moved the hard drives from the top 3.5″ bay where they are now to the bottom one (the thing with all the round holes), which was fairly necessary to make everything work around the video card, which…ok. See that big red and black thing that’s eating two expansion slots and is almost but not quite sticking into the drive bay? Yeah, that’s my video card. It’s something like 3″ longer and twice as thick as my old one. It also forces a ridiculous amount of cable re-routing. It was fun.
That having been said and done, what with that giant CPU fan, the card fan, and my hasn’t-been-used-in-five-years top case fan, I was expecting Samsonesque issues, but it appears to be able to run Fallout 3 and fullscreen movies (Firefly looks very shiny) quite well. Thus far, I am mostly impressed. Too, while I half expected Samson’s noise issues, too, the whole case is almost dead silent, even mid-whatever. Only reason I even know it’s on is because of the top fan, which is about as loud as my entire computer used to be while everything else is silent.
I am also impressed by the ridiculous speed I’ve gained from joining the 21st century and going with SATA drives. I had sort of realized that when I got my high speed IDE drive in November, but holy shit. I like.
Of other notes, I finally, for the first time in a decade, have a monochrome computer case. All black finally, save for the silver/blue mouse and the indestructable beige battleship keyboard from 1996, which has a nice sticker proudly proclaiming its having been designed for Windows 95. Now that I’ve exited the floppy era, it’s my only connection to the days of yore.
The bit I’m not impressed about are my two hardware issues. The Seagate Freeagent Pro is apparently having some sort of issue with what I think is my BIOS, wherein I get to the BIOS loading screen and immediately reboot. We’ll see what I can do about that. The other is my ATI TV Wonder tuner card, which is apparently incompatable with Windows Vista, and…yeah, let’s talk about that for a bit.
You’ll recall that previously, I was unsure as how or if my copy of Vista Ultimate 32 bit Student version was going to install, and in that case, how the hell I was going to get a XP SP3 slipstream to burn to CD and then install. Thanks to Samson and Sarah, I got the XP issue resolved, but it turned out not to be needed. All you need to do to do clean installs with Vista upgrade media is detailed here, but it’s pretty simple:
1. Throw Vista in your DVD drive. Boot. It will do some shit that will probably be slow, then it will ask you if you want to enter your product key. Do not enter your product key, and uncheck “Automatically activate Windows when I’m online” and click Next. You’ll be asked if you’re really sure. You are sure.
2. Install your version of Vista (Ultimate in my case). This is all fairly self-explanatory.
3. Eventually you’ll get to the desktop. From there, open up Explorer, navigate to your DVD drive, and run Vista setup again. This time, choose the Upgrade option, enter your key, say yes to activation, and go. Ultimately this will all work.
In my case, this entire process, start to finish, took on order of 45 minutes, of which about 25 of it was spent messing up because I didn’t set my BIOS up correctly. The other two installs, combined, maybe took 20 minutes, which is extremely impressive to say the least.
There are other steps, however, which were…somewhat slower:
Now, because I’m sure you’ll all want to know my opinion on Vista, the anti-Christ OS of our day, well…
So far, I like it more than I dislike it. To step down a few points on the list:
1. Aero UI – I sort of pooh-poohed the Aero UI when I first heard about it, being all “Windows Classic 4 LIFE!” and all that, and please if I ever say that without irony shoot me, but I didn’t realize how much I’d actually like it. It’s shiny, but it’s good.
2. New Start Menu – Takes some getting used to, but I like it. It feels more like it’s actively trying to help me than not, which is nice. On that same note, I completely love the new taskbar and toolbars setup, with a couple exceptions. I can’t change my side toolbar background, which sucks because it’s lavander. And, uh, that other quibble I can’t remember right now.
On the other hand, the window previews you get by mouseover on the taskbar and using alt-tab? Yeah, those rock. I now have an IE-like address bar straight on my taskbar, for marginally faster URL entry if I want it, and I actually have a few times now.
3. Sidebar – The sidebar is awesome. I haven’t really begun to take advantage of it, but right now I’ve got a nice big digital clock, a notepad, and a multi-search gadget that lets me search Wikipedia and Google and a ton of others from the desktop. In future, I’ll start thinking about Winamp controls and some email stuff.
4. Explorer – New explorer window takes some getting used to, but the more I use it, the more comfortable I get with it, and the more I like it. The breadcrumbs address bar is pretty useful, and if you take five minutes to customize your favorite links menu (I added both my hard drive roots and my webpage dir), you’ll be much happier. This is functionality I wished I had had in XP for years.
That having been said, search appears to be only partially responsive, and I don’t think it’s searching one of my drives. I will need to look into this.
5. Games Explorer – A pretty big meh here. I see what MS wanted to do with this, and I think it would be a good idea, but I think it would be an even better idea if it worked. So far, I’ve got a 75% detection rate for my games, and a somewhat lower rate for actually getting versions and the like correct. A handy spot to get to all my games, yes. Make me waffles and walk the dog, however, it does not.
6. User Access Control – Works so far…reasonably well, insofar as I have two accounts set up, one admin, one normal user. So far, UAC has shown up all the times it was supposed to, save one I’ll talk about in a sec, and while it’s annoying, it’s livable.
On the other hand, I spent about 3 hours last night trying to install Medieval 2 Total War and the Kingdoms expansion, and I’m pretty unthrilled with the experience. Apparently, and keep in mind it took me about 5 installs to learn this, going to setup from the MTW autorun menus is entirely full of fail, because setup never calls UAC, which means it never installs a bunch of stuff, which means the rest fails. Twice. So you need to navigate onto the DVDs and run setup that way. Ah well. Vista’s fault? CA’s fault for making a fucked up splash screen in Two Thousand and Goddamn Seven? Take your pick.
7. General speed and stability – Thus far, keeping in mind I have 2 days under my belt on pretty good hardware but not much more, the system has been more or less responsive and solid, performing just as if not more speedily than XP (granted on a newer generation of hardware), albeit with a couple of hiccups:
- File copy times are essentially Vista waving bronze knives and consulting sheep entrails, because they are wrong. Essentially always, but especially on the long ones. The progress bar is right though.
- One of either AVG antivirus or Nero InCD started dropping me BSODs today out of nowhere. Since uninstalling Nero these have ceased, and since I’m filled with hate for InCD in the first place, and since this is apparently a known issue on certain versions of InCD without a fix in situations where there’s no media in the drive, well, I’m going to blame the Nero people for writing shitty code, here.
Compatability – So apparently my piece of crap ATI TV Wonder card that’s 5 years old maybe doesn’t work with Vista, but only maybe. Considering it sucked in XP too, I’m finding it hard to get worked up about this.
Aside from that, well, M2TW was a bitch to install, but considering you get this sort of shit from CA all the damn time, I’m not sure how much of that to blame on Vista. And besides THAT, well…all these pictures got edited in a 1996 copy of Paintshop Pro 4.12. Does that answer the question? Everything has pretty well just worked, straight out of the box. That having been said, my night looks about like this:
Yeah, it’ll be fun.
In the continuing computer upgrade saga, I present you the following picture, displaying the ruins of my computer, completely disassembled, next to the pile of boxes that contain the parts I will soon use to rebuild it to be bigger, faster, and stronger, now that I possess the appropriate technology. Except for the DVD drives, which are apparently in Massachusetts somewhere, and except for the fan filters, which are apparently in Tennessee, but you know, tomorrow.
Yes, my case is made of awesome, why do you ask?
Also on that note, pop is hard to get off LCD screens. Also, clean your keyboard more than once per 15 years. Just saying.
For our other picture, well, every self-respecting computer geek has his or her share of phone cables, cat-5 ethernet cables, s-video cables, coax cables, power cords, USB cables, Firewire cables, audio cables, and the like. But then there are connectors. And I have some interesting ones:
Starting from A through I:
A – Component audio/video + s-video to VIVO converter. Used by my ATI TV tuner card to connect in my VCR.
B – Component video + s-video to VIVO converter. I think this may have come with my old video card. I am unsure as to why I would want to use this for anything. Projectors maybe?
C – Male RCA L/R audio to male TRS. This used to be what hooked my computer to my stereo.
D – Ditto, although the meaning of the black and gold color scheme is lost to me.
E – Female RCA L/R audio to female TRS. Again, I have no idea why I have this, or why I would ever need one, although I am fairly sure I did at one point.
F – Dual female TRS audio to male TRS. Radio Shack vintage here again, which used to be part of a chain that went sound card to extender cable to this to headphones/speakers, until I realized the whole setup was dumb. I kept the extender until recently, but scrapped this.
G – Gameport to USB converter. Radio Shack again, part of a failed attempt to make my beloved Sidewinder joystick work in the modern era of computing.
H – USB to PS/2 connector from one of several MS Intellimice.
I – A USB to cat-5 cable. I have no idea where this came from, and I can’t even begin to understand why you would use this, or for that matter, what you would use it for. Completely beyond me.
I’m sure I got a few of these slightly wrong, and Whir or my Dad could correct me, but enh, you get the point. I really just wanted to throw out that whack USB to cat-5 thing for public ponderance.
So I have a Toshiba Satellite laptop, 2004 vintage. Great machine, had an HD death once upon a time but has otherwise been rock solid since I got it. It is, however, not my as-of-right-now-dead-and-in-pieces desktop, which is bad. Which brings us to several related issues pertaining to my new desktop upgrade plan, which will get ordered as soon as the bank gives me my money:
1. I have a box of old computer parts. In it are old DVD drives, splitters of various sorts, adapters, lengths of cat5 and coax, an old 5 port hub, and an analog MS Sidewider joystick that has a date of like 1995 on it. I love that joystick, although it’s now useless.
What I do not have, however, is a goddamn SATA cable, because for whatever reason Seagate didn’t bother to send me one when I bought the external drive. Then again, I just realized I don’t have any sort of external SATA ports, so I guess USB is going to have to do.
2. On that same note, I apparently left my supply of drive mounting screws and black plastic whateverthefucktheyares for my case fan mounts sitting in a box in a pile of stuff in Oregon. I know which box they’re in. This is nevertheless quite unhelpful to me, on the whole.
I did at least bother to keep the bay shields for my 3.5″ bay on the case, which will become shortly relevant. I’m not a total idiot – I just play one in real life.
3. I have at least one and maybe two dead case fans – I can’t really remember if I replaced my rear one or not. This isn’t a particularly big deal, as case fans are essentially free, but holy fuck is my top fan a pain in the ass to deal with.
4. On a final note, a problem, detailed in part here, which involves a peculiarity of the initial versions of Windows XP involving their inability to read hard drives greater than 137 GB or so. I’m looking at a pair of 500 GB drives, so this is of some concern to me.
Now, normally, I’d just use my student copy of Vista Ultimate to install from, but get this – you can only use that disc to upgrade from an already installed version of Windows. So we’re left with alternate options.
A. Use my Acronis tools to just dump a backup copy of my system onto the drive. This is what I did the last time around, and the whole process was essentially akin to wrestling velociraptors with my pinky, and really wasn’t a whole lot of fun, and never mind the backup being like a month old now, never mind that I’m just going to extract all my data from my perfectly ok drive anyway.
B. Scream in anger, and go buy a goddamn copy of Vista Home Premium for about $100 from Newegg. I may be able to, for whatever this is worth, use my student copy of Ultimate as an upgrade, which given the whack nature of the thing may or may not be possible. On the plus side, the Home Premium workaround will…work.
C. Do some sort of slipstream update to my original XP disc via the SP3 slipstream instructions here. This may or may not actually work, but it will definitely require me to install XP on a gimped version of my new system to make the install CD, definitely take me a few hours, and will most definitely piss me off and Jesus fucking Christ on a pogo stick why don’t I just go back to fucking Windows 98 and fuck with display drivers for 5 hours again for about the same level of fun? At least it’s free, and I guess I could use the Ultimate CD to upgrade the fucker afterwords, but what the crap.
D. It may actually be possible in theory to use my existant XP install disc to install from, then use my Vista disc to upgrade, and fuck with drives that way.
…On even further thought, it occurs to me that my 2002 XP install disc will probably look at my brand new 2008 hardware and go “Abuh? Abuh? AbuhabuhabuhBSOD”
In conclusion, argh.
[EDIT]
Ok, XP SP3 slipstream mostly taken care of. Also, if this is correct, I ought to be able to do a fresh install off my Vista disc, albeit with some pain. Thanks for changing upgrade behavior. You malicious fucktwattish assholes.
This doesn’t really solve my mounting hardware issues, but oh well.
Re: That whole issue with nothing happening for me to talk about – About 10 minutes after I posted the nice picture, my desktop decided to brick itself. Surfing along happily, bam, dead. I’ve got fans and a power light and that’s it.
On the plus side, at least I really wanted to upgrade my computer.
In absence of actual content, which is coming, I promise you, but not, I think, just yet, I offer you this picture, which may be slightly contextualized by my telling you that my kitchen doesn’t ever really get heated:
Yes. I am wearing my NINJ4 hoodie with bright yellow dish gloves. I am l33t. Or something.
(and_click_this_if_you_missed_the_first_one)
With a nod to the glory days of shwi and my desire to read the whole thing through again now that it’s being written again after a 3 year hiatus, and so I can not go digging through the hell that is the Google Groups interface:
Empty America Parts 1-36
Dictionary posts (read before Part 37+)
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 37
Part 38
Part 39
Part 40
Part 41
Part 42
Part 43
Part 44