since I upgraded to 7. Sorry, I know it doesn’t fit the song.
Anyhow, after fighting with a few ill-behaved installers, everything’s running.
I removed all the plugins and extensions from Firefox that I don’t have in a clean-slate install, figuring maybe one of the ones in my profile horked things. It seems to work, but I haven’t really pushed it.
Still bad that a single app (or an extension to same) can take the OS out.
Still investigating. Further news as events warrant.
Right. Got everything going again. Quickbooks? Check. Callstation (Voicemail and phone) Check. Pidgin? Check. Mozilla?
Not so check.
So I’m running Mozilla, doing the morning surf, and the window blinks and freezes. What follows next is a system fail of epic proportion. Yes, a 32-bit app Brought a 64-bit operating system to its knees.
So, not believing that this could possibly be the case, and figuring it must be hardware because both times it happened my RAID wanted to rebuild, I tested the drives. They’re fine. And Mozilla under 32 bit Fedora worked fine.
To test my hypothesis, I installed Opera and ran that all day.
The system’s still up.
You do the math. And yes, I googled, and found reports of Mozilla crashing on Win 7 x64, but not blowing Windows completely the fuck away.
I’ve finally gotten around to putting 7 on the Big Workstation. Went 64 bit and the whole nine. Decided to mimic the experience I’m putting my customers through by making it a domain member and working as a limited user.
What a pain in the ass.
Installing software is easier on 7 than XP as a limited user, I’ll grant that. But this arrangement only points out just how far behind the times software developers are. I mean, this has been an “official” best practices thing for the better part of a decade now, and software still doesn’t get it.
The big hitters (Office 2007, Visual Studio 2008) work fine when installed as “Administrator” but used as “BrianC”. In fact, most stuff does. FOSS like Pidgin and 7-Zip work fine.
But then there’s the exceptions. Quickbooks itself worked without an issue. But the Quickbooks Outlook Sync program only works for the user that installed it. So simply elevating to Administrator doesn’t cut it. So it’s log out, go back in as admin, bump my domain user to local administrator, go back in as me, and install.
Same thing with the Palm software. Desktop installed fine, but then started Hotsync in the Administrator context, rendering the first (bluetooth only, no USB drivers for you 64 bit folks!) sync useless. Where it gets worse is all the related apps. Documents To Go didn’t install itself properly (since it didn’t see a profile), Smartlist To Go wouldn’t install at all until I was a local administrator myself.
Come on folks, get with the times. Microsoft is trying to make an operating system that doesn’t get hosed by users running with Administrator privileges because you clowns can’t get your shit together and write software that allows people to run with lower privileges on their machines.
So I’ve had the UPS next to the living room PC for a couple weeks. Cat loves to walk up against that wall.
Today it occurred to me that she could step on the switch and shut the computer off.
So she did.
I’ve installed it on a six year old Thinkpad. It runs better than XP did on the same machine. So far all my apps work, but then again there’s been time for developers to accommodate the changes that Vista required and for me to upgrade in the normal course of events. Because ATi sucks, I had to rely on a hacked driver package to get the video to work, but other than that it’s been pretty smooth. Installed from a USB stick.
In other news, I’ve got the RC installed on a 7 year old Athlon XP with an nVidia 7600GS in it. This was my “daily driver” until I replaced it in 2007. I’ve got most of the stuff I use on a daily basis installed on it and running fine.
Windows 7 – what Vista should have been.
I’m experimenting with the X31. Figured I’d toss a new drive in it and put Windows 7 on there. The vista drivers for power and other stuff don’t work, of course.
Lenovo has drivers for the Windows 7 Beta/RC.
I don’t remember seeing this happen for the Vista release. Maybe MS finally got their shit together and has the hardware vendors getting ready to support older hardware on the new OS. That would be quite a change, eh?
Oh, so far? Windows 7 runs fine on a 6 year old laptop.
Dell’s outsourcing their manufacturing. What else is new. But if this comment on /. is correct, they’re totally fucked:
You make a point, but you’ve missed the larger picture. I am a Dell employee and I can tell you the future of the company is not manufacturing PCs or notebooks, but rather offering services-after-the sale for the machines built by contract manufacturers.
Well, if you’re planning to offer “services after the sale”, what do you have to offer that’s going to get me to open my wallet? I bought my last laptop 4 years ago. Do you know how much contact I’ve had with the manufacturer since I got it? None. No services. No upgrades. I didn’t buy the extended warranty. I haven’t sent the unit in for service. Granted, I can replace my own keyboard when it wears out, but I didn’t even buy THAT from them, I got it from an overstock place on the internet.
If Dell thinks that they are going to make money the way that car dealerships do, they’re mad. Of course, they aren’t. The real reason they’re outsourcing the manufacturing is money. They can have machines built in China for half of what it costs to build them in Round Rock. And you can bet your last dollar that they won’t be dropping their prices.
I set up a gallery to post pictures from the cell phone. I’m still working out some details, but for now it works pretty well.
Look here to see what I see.
w00t!
Somehow, I managed to hose the database. I don’t know quite how, but I hosed it real good like. Since I had so little in the gallery, I just blanked it and created a fresh db in MySQL5 and reimported my pictures. What little commentary I may have added I’ll hunt down and put back in the fullness of time.
I’m also going to start uploading more stuff. And with the new camera, I’ll have more stuff already digital.
The gallery is here.
In the process of upgrading to Gallery 2.2, I nuked my installation. How? Stupidity. I figured “hey, why not take this opportunity to migrate the database to MySQL 5″. Bad move. Something got horked in the database move, and most of the pretty went with it. And it was down hill from there. It was only about 50 pictures, so no harm, no foul -I’ll just re-import them and everything will be fine.
Long story short: I wiped it out, and started with a clean slate. I know it was the database move because doing the same thing to my mother’s gallery without changing the database yielded a perfect upgrade. Of course, since I haven’t shown her how to use it yet, she has no pictures in it.
Lesson – upgrade one thing at a time, kids.