If It’s Not One Thing
May 26th, 2007 by Don Ray
You know the old saying, “If its not one thing, then its another”. It appears that some strange anomaly is now attacking my primary PC. This is really strange. It takes forever to boot and then hangs saying some USB drive (none are connected) could not be found and to press F1 to continue. After pressing F1, it comes up, but acts very weird. I can hear it periodically access the hard drive. Another time the HD light stayed on continuously. The PC ran and seemed to do everything correctly, but it is obviously sick.
I spent this morning backing everything up to my external portable hard drive. I have printed a hardcopy of everything on Outlook and will start getting the Linux PC back up to an equivalent state. I am either going to have hard drive problems or the controller on the motherboard is going bad or it is some other strange event happening.
Don Ray,
When you get a chance, you might want to download Thunderbird for Windows and import the Outlook files. On Linux, you can either use Thunderbird or Evolution (which can import the mailboxes from Thunderbird). I’ve been using Evolution for several years and I’ve got my wife and daughter using Thunderbird on Windows.
Don,
I have been reading your blog for some time now, and have found it most enjoyable. Makes me want to see Panama, especially since I retired in 05 and have plenty of time to travel. Going to Germany in
September.
Now, back to your problem might be a windoze registry problem, or you might want to try a clean boot.
Follow this link to Microsloft http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=310353
I have an IBM T30 laptop, which is dual boot: Unbuntu Dapper Drake and windoze xp. I use Linux about 95% of the time. The only thing I use windoze for is Adobe Photoshop. I just like it better than GIMP. I might try and get it to run under Linux with WINE. Hope its just a software problem, wait thats and oxymoron when you say Microsoft and software problem in the same sentence.
Tuxi - Thanks for the tip. I will try that the next time I get enough nerve to fire up the XP system again. I did export comma embedded files for my contacts, but haven’t had the time to get them imported to evolution.
Kevin - Thanks for taking the time to leave a comment. Enjoy your trip to Germany. Guess you will get there before it turns real cold.
I have a hard time thinking it is a regiatery problem on the XP system. It doesn’t do the same thing all the time. When I last shut it down, I could do everything, surf the net, copy fiels, but the hard drive kept running all the time. I could also hear the sound as if it were seeking to a new location on the hard drive.
At least I have all files moved (I think) and am up on the Linux system at the moment. I have used XP so long, I now have to learn the equivelent thing to do in Linux. What is the best photo management tool for me to use on Linux to alter the photos for the Net?
Kevin,
Crossover Office (http://www.codeweavers.com) can run some versions of Photoshop within Linux. I learned on the GIMP so not having Photoshop is not too much of a problem. There is also a way to run your Windows partition in a VM in Linux.
So you are telling me that GIMP is the Linux equivalent of Photoshop?
The GIMP can do a lot of what Photoshop can do. Check out http://www.gimpguru.org. I do a lot of photo touch up with the GIMP, but my main tool with the D-50 is Bibble ( http://www.bibblelabs.com ), which is a great RAW photo workflow program.
Thanks again. Now all I need is a little time to absorb all this information.
Don,
Here is some more info (link) on the Evil Empire in Redmond Washington, and its new Vista OS. I won’t tuch it, too evil. When I walk by a copy of it at a local computer show the box starts talking in tounges. Way to evil for me. Don’t get me wrong I don’t dislike windoze, it does a lot of things well. It’s just the people who run the company are very devious. More on that later. Later is here. The Evil empire made a registry entry for the Office Suit in 1999 so that it would phone home to Microsoft any problems it was having. Good idea right? Microsloft liked it so much that it tweaked the software to send even more info too Redmond. Oh, and the new Genuine Advantage they sell you as a critical up date is nothing more than spyware, along with the usual crashes. Oh, here is link on Vista, it is also full of spyware, along with all the DRM that the Evil Empire wants to get in on (what I can an cannot do with hardware and software) Now they want to sue the Open Source community for copyright infringement. How do you copyright a mathmatical antilogarithm? The link finally: http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=39087
Later
Hi Kevin. I can tell you are not high on Microsoft´s products. I will give the link a look. Thanks for dropping in.
Don,
It’s not that I am not high on Microsoft its just that when you pay a fortune for an OS you would hope it would be secure and not get the blue screen of death. When I retired from the Baltimore City Police Department in 05, they had already converted there servers to Suse Linux. Why you may ask? Security, reliability, and cost. Linux is not perfect and it does have its own learning curve. But I do like its security, reliability, and cost. Yes I do donate. Keep up the good work. Hope to make it to Panama one day. Take care.
I understand Kevin. I have used the Suse Linux, but think I like the UBUNTU better. It does have a learning curve, but I seem to have everything working now.
Don Ray,
Were you aware that Dell now is preloading desktops and laptops with Ubuntu 7.04? Here’s the link: http://tinyurl.com/2ub797.
Yes, I saw that the other day. Interesting - huh!
Here’s good news for all you Evolution cheerleaders. (Count me as one) I just finished installing Evolution on a Windows 2000 Pro box yesterday. Of course, like any good Linux Freak, I wash my hands every time I have to touch a Windows machine.
Anyway, Evolution has been ported to Windows and while it works a bit different, it’s still Evolution and is a good replacement for the Outlook Virus Distribution Agent. Get it here;
http://shellter.sourceforge.net/evolution/
Never mind what the article say, it will work on Win 2K Pro.
Oh, btw, Don Ray, what’s the problem? I thought that was the way Windows was supposed to work.
Henry - When you installed Evolution on Windows, did that allow you to move your email history to the Linux box? That is what I want to get done that I haven´t figurred out how to do.