Saturday, March 22, 2008

All Is Well In Randyland


Well, the great flood of 2008 is finished. It taught me a valuable lesson that I had obviously forgotten somewhere along the way. Don't put all your eggs (or files) in one basket.

I went out and bought a full sized laptop, one of those desktop replacement thingies just in case my main computer ever went kaput for any reason. I feel much better now, secure even. Sadly I couldn't go with a little eeepc simply because it couldn't hope to replace a full on desktop in it's wildest miniaturized dreams. Perhaps I'll buy one when the 9" screen version is cheap.

My new Toshiba (which is made to look a bit like an expensive Macbook, a plus, but came loaded with Vista, a big minus, booooo!), is going through severe testing as I pound out the second half of First Light Chronicles: Starfree Port, listen to numerous mp3's, customize the shoddy OS (Vista has blue screened on me three times), and watch a couple videos. I even installed Ubuntu on it for a few hours only to discover that the drivers weren't available for this chipset just yet. I wouldn't really know how to install them if they were available, but I'd be willing to learn so I could avoid Vista!

Anyway, back to work I go, churning out what I think is the most interesting and exciting part of the First Light series. I just hope I don't lose anything because of Vista, the operating system that lives up to the dumb blond stereotype better than any blond I've met. It's pretty, it's even a little sexy, but it's as dumb as a fencepost and tends to slow everything down as it flourishes and poses during common, every day tasks.

If anyone happens to know how this Linux beginner can get his Toshiba A200 running without Microsoft, please drop me an email.

Back to work I go!

RL

1 comment:

Ken Guie said...

Hey RL, that leak in the roof really stinks. I should take a lesson and back up my files. It's something I planned to do when I purchased the 1st of my currently 3 ext hard drives. I do seem to like procrastinating as well. I might just plastic bag one as well and scatter them around the room (after all, leaks, they can happen anywhere! heh heh)

I totally agree with your (and others') vista findings. I had to get an HP with it after my sony R505 died. It seems to act better lately but it sure is a slow memory hog. I plan to put ubuntu on a flash drive and start playing around as soon as i get some time. Just keep googling for your toshiba model number and ubuntu. Hopefully someone will have "upgraded" soon.

Take care.