chrishansenhome

The new computer is working. The good things are:

It has 16GB of RAM: this allows it to boot up in record time.

It is quiet. You can hardly hear it going—even though it's got 4 fans in it.

The drives that I installed from the old computer still work, and almost all of my data has been preserved.

It's got USB2 and 3 both.

So what, you ask, are the bad things.

First, I relied on my backup too much. I have an HP server on the desk that takes a backup every day. However, the backup is not easy to use when the computer goes belly-up, and I didn't discover until too late that there is a recovery procedure. When I did find it, I then discovered that if you change computers the old backup doesn't transfer to the new computer. I didn't use other tools I have, such as Acronis TrueImage, which would have helped immensely in this situation.

Second, I didn't write down the methods for restoring items such as my email from Thunderbird and my iTunes library, both of which are extensive and are not on the C: drive. I have 44GB of emails, from the last 18 years. I keep everything. This has saved my bacon several times, when someone denies that they said something or other I can dig out the email and show them. However, Thunderbird has a difficult recovery procedure when you reinstall the program. The first time I did this it was excruciatingly painful. The second time I remembered what I'd done and it was relatively painless. iTunes, of course, was quite different. There are two library files which you have to delete from the new installation and copy from the old one. When I did that, iTunes filled up with my music (which, of course had been there all the time). However, not all the album artwork migrated over.

A thing I did right was I put all my data on a drive other than the C: drive. That meant that all my data was preserved even after I had to reinstall Windows 7 Professional. I tried various recovery methods, but none of them worked. Had some of the data been on the C: drive, I might have lost it forever (even with a server backup). It wasn't, and I didn't. In addition, the data drive was a totally separate drive from the Windows drive. If your C: drive dies, you still have your data.

A good outcome of this was: I now have a clean install of Windows 7 Professional 64 bit. Windows tends to accrue a lot of cruft over the years. I know people who reinstall Windows every 6 months. They keep a backup of their disk, of course, and try to make sure that all programs are housed on their data disk. I can now configure Windows to my liking.

Here's a picture of Gertrude. I named the computer after Gertrude Stein, a great mind of the 20th century.

Current Mood: relieved
Current Location: London, in my study

I realise I've recounted more than necessary about my computer woes. Well, here's a bit more for you.

The new computer now has the Blu-ray/DVD/CD drive installed, the memory installed, and all the interior cables connected. This has been a real eyeopener for me: I haven't put a computer together (as opposed to repairing one) in years. So it's quite a bit different.

There are five fans in it (if you count the CPU fan and the fan in the power supply), and I trust they work.

The current computer seems to be stable over the short term. However, the longer it is on, the more likely it is to reboot itself. So I shut it off whenever I go away for more than a moment.

Now I will make a recovery DVD so that I can get back my account/desktop/etc. if the computer reboots at an awkward time.

When my new computer is going and working fine I'll introduce it. Or maybe "her". Should computers get a name? And should that name be male or female? Enquiring minds want to know.

Current Mood: pensive
Current Location: London, in my study

I posted a picture of my new computer with a lot of its guts hanging out a few days ago. Unfortunately, my old computer chose that very time to have a CPU-fart.

I was eating dinner on Monday evening, with the computer on in the next room doing mostly nothing. When I returned to the computer, the login screen was showing. And just as I went to log in, it disappeared and the computer restarted. This happened several times so I turned it off and booted into safe mode. When I logged in, I got nothing in particular. My email had disappeared, and the profile I logged in to was temporary. OMFG!

After turning the air blue, I decided to turn the thing off and think about it overnight. When I got to it on Tuesday morning, I had no more success, although I found my email profile file and copied it off onto a memory stick just in case. Turned the air blue some more when the profile was still "temporary".

I also found that my backup, while it contained my Users folder, wouldn't let me look at it. So that was useless too.

Then my DVD-drive, as it sometimes does, began cycling. It opened, then shut, then opened again, then shut again. I don't know why--some have suggested that it's haunted. I'll just buy a new optical drive for the new computer, in case it is occupied by something other than a DVD disk.

This morning, while struggling with that, I thought to myself: "Why not just rename this profile to "xxxChris" and rename the Administrator account (which wasn't temporary) to "Chris". So that's what I did, and it was a success.

I recovered my emails into Thunderbird (horribly complicated, as is Mozilla's wont), recovered Live Journal, the Book of Face, Google in its various incarnations, Twitter, Instagram, etc. etc. and so on and so forth. I haven't tried for iTunes yet as I understand there's some kind of worldwide outage. Spotify won't let me install it on my desktop, God only knows why. But other stuff seems to be here.

I won't be doing more work on the new computer until I get this one mostly fixed. I have been urged by a friend (you know who you are, Brett!) to get a Mac, but I'm not made of money. I have also been advised to load Ubuntu or some other flavour of Linux on the new computer. I probably won't do that, but I'm keeping that up my sleeve, so to speak.

The next task is to make a system recovery disk.

The moral of the story is this: no matter how much you back up (or don't) or how much you try to protect your computer, when it decides to screw up on you there is NO way to fix it easily.

Current Mood: frustrated
Current Location: London, in my study

When HWMBO went to Singapore, I asked him to buy computer components for a new computer for me. When he returned, I had a motherboard, a processor, 16GB of memory, a hard disk, and a couple of other things I forget now. Conversely, I had to provide the case and fans, plus front-panel USB 3.0 ports.

I bought a tower case with one fan, and bought two more fans. Now came the hard part: putting it all together.

First I put the USB 3.0 ports in. The case specs said that all that kind of thing ought to be easy to install as it had easy-lock bays. Well, the carrier for the ports was ever so slightly too narrow to allow the carrier to be in an easy-lock bay. So I had to scrabble around for proper screws. Fumbling with the carrier before I realised that I needed screws turned the air somewhat blue. So, I have to work when HWMBO is out of the house at work. That way he won't get upset that I swear so much.

Then came the motherboard. It came with a shedload of screws, spacers, and the like. The backplate for the rear ports was in there, as well as little cable ties to keep the interior cables away from the fans (not for playing 50 Shades of Grey with mice). I installed a fan in the bottom and a fan in the top of the back, then tried to install the motherboard. No success, more blue air. I finally determined that the fan in the back was obstructing, ever so slightly, the backplate for the ports.

So this afternoon, I took out the fan, got the motherboard and the backplate settled correctly, then turned the air a bit more blue as I tried to fit the screws keeping down the motherboard into the spacers I'd placed in the case previously. It took around 1/2 hour to do that, as some of the screws are in remote corners of the motherboard. Got that done, check.

Now for the CPU. They don't have pins and sockets any more. There are pins on the motherboard and little pads on the CPU underside. I followed the instructions, even though there were no words and some of the illustrations were really bizarre. The heatsink on the bottom of the CPU fan already had thermal paste on it, so the paste I bought wasn't used. Got the fan settled and locked down.

Now for the fun part: Cables. You can see from the picture below that the inside of the computer is like a worm convention. Some of the cables aren't needed. However, I placed all the ones that were needed onto the motherboard and I think they are in the correct places. Here's the picture.

The next phase is critical. I must back up my current SSD C: drive and clone my current HDD to the drive I just got. I will install the memory (people keep saying that 8GB is enough, but I'm greedy and I suspect that even Chrome can't easily fill 16GB up.

Then I open up the current PC, remove the SSD and HDD, and place them in the new case. Bring the whole thing downstairs, connect up the KB, mouse, and monitor, and fire it up. I might say a Hail Mary beforehand. If it works, I remove the shell of the old computer (keeping it around just in case), put the new tower under my desk, connect everything up, and I'm good to go. I may be away for a few hours or a day. I will give notice of that on Twitter and the Book of Face.

The next phase is to consider what kind of desk I need for all this. My current one is no longer suitable for various reasons (even though it's good; I might put it on Freecycle). When I get the new desk (possibly augmented by a 3-drawer filing cabinet on which to place my printer) everything in here needs to be labelled, removed into the living room, the study cleaned and the new desk and filing cabinet installed and, finally, all the equipment returned.

All of this because I wanted USB 3.0 ports and my current computer won't support them. Oh well, all good fun. Watch this space!

Current Mood: half-accomplished
Current Location: London, in my study

I have been having difficulties with Windows lately. The keyboard has become flaky; when I type, sometimes a letter does not appear, or a backspace doesn't happen. There is no rhyme nor reason (it happens with two different keyboards) and unpredictably (so it's not a dirty keyboard issue). I've tried everything, including checking for viruses and searching for other people who have had this difficulty. Nothing has helped.

So I have been trying to get my older computer to work for a while now. It had Vista on it, but that's buggered, in many different ways. So I decided to install Ubuntu on it. I got a PCI wireless card with a good external antenna, as I'm not satisfied with the Ethernet bridge I had upstairs. I installed Fedora 10 on it just so that I could get to the Internet and download Ubuntu. I had to un-RAID my hard drives as they didn't seem to play well with Ubuntu (and I didn't have time to make them do so), So I installed the card and switched the computer on, expecting to have to search for a driver.

No driver necessary: the PCI card was recognised instantly and all I had to provide was the password. Downloaded Ubuntu, burned a disk, and then installed it. It's v.12.04, and it installed quite easily.

I'm exploring what's available as far as software is concerned. I have a browser (Firefox), an IM program (Pidgin), a Twitter program (Turpial), and a journal editor (Drivel) so far. Drivel isn't very satisfactory as it doesn't seem to pick up my tags, so I'll have to type them in. Will continue searching.

Any suggestions for software I ought to have? Email will be Thunderbird, but I'm not ready to switch over entirely so I have to be careful about installing it just yet.

To be continued.