Hibernation Problem Solved
Ah well, I solved the hibernation problem on the Thinkpad. Turned out to be an older application that did not live well with Thinkpad Power Manager and SP3. I have no idea what I am going to replace the application with, I do not think it has been updated in several years.
I ordered a new battery for the Thinkpad from eBay. It is on a slow boat from China, no telling when it will get here.
I also ordered a UPS from eBay. It is a used APC SmartUPS 1500 without batteries. It should be here in a few days. I will have to order new batteries for it. I am having a hard time figuring out what the difference is between a $60 set and a $200 set. Well I do know that some of them are preassembled battery packs, and some are just a couple of batteries, but is there a real quality difference between the cheap ones and the expensive ones? Also one has to watch the shipping charges on something like that as they quote between $17 and $50 for UPS Ground. Strangely it is not the closest places that are the cheapest. I guess something in the middle range ($100 shipped) is probably the best bet.
So much for the lunch money George sent.
It does not compute!
Or only part time.
I have continued to have to tinker with both the workstation and the laptop. That is not all bad. First I upgraded the X24 Thinkpad with an 60gb 7200rpm drive. I also ordered a higher speed version of the wireless pc-card I have in it, but it arrived DOA. I will have to wait on the refund before I can try and find another. It needs a new battery as well. Then I upgraded the workstation with a pair of Opteron 870 processors. All from ebay, the boonie dweller’s friend. So much for that stimulous payment check.
I have had some more problems with the hibernation on the X24, as of now I am pretty sure it is either AVG 8.0 or Spybot Search & Destroy causing it. One of them seems to be shutting it off so they laptop can not shut down on them and not turning it back on when it is done scanning. Do I really need them? I used to upgrade and run them once a week, and felt I was well protected from malware. Somehow they have taken over all my computers; and the workstation is the only one that is not brought to its knees by them. I guess it is back to manual scans.
Today I found a pair of Baby Advent II speakers at the local Goodwill Store. Eight bucks and they work fine. Baby Advents are nice bookshelf speakers from the 70-80’s. Definately decent sounding. I had a pair back in those days so there is a large element of nostalgia involved in finding them.
I have also moved up in the digital photography world. The local Staples Office Supply Store had a sale on PNY 2gb compact flash cards so I bought one. I do not really need all the extra space but the 266x speed is nice.
Golly, I sure have spent a lot of money this month…
On a non-monetary front I have been playing with nLite a freeware program for customizing your Windows Installation CD. It makes it easy to slipstream in the latest Service Pack. It also lets you set up an unattended boot and walk away install. Most of us do have better things to do with our time than sitting in front of our computers answering Microsoft’s questions. It also allows you to customize things a bit, saving most of that time you spend after installing Windows setting it up to work the way you like it to work. Definitely worthwhile for the power user in us. Highly recommended.
Back Up and Running
Well, this wipe and restore has me putting in a bit of effort to make the next time easier.
First, I moved My Documents to the Archive Drive D: on the server, and E: on this workstation. Then I set them up with SyncBack to synchronize their files so I have exactly the same data on both computers and if I change it on one it will on the other within 24 hours (I have SyncBack scheduled to run once a day). Then I moved the Outlook folder to My Documents, so that will stay synchronized too. All this means that if I have one of the systems go down again, I can do my stuff on the other until I get the crashed machine working and then they will resync with each other.
Moving My Documents is easy. You just click on START, the green box in the corner of your screen, then right click on My Documents in that menu. At the bottom of the menu that brings up is a Properties line. Click on Properties and you get a pop-up that tells you where My Documents currently is and has three radio buttons. The center one is Move. Click on that and you get a pop-up asking for a destination folder. Once you select that, you click Apply and then you get a pop-up asking if you want to move the contents to the new location. Select yes and all your folders are copied to the new location. While it does not say so, I suggest you then reboot so the change will be permanent.
Moving the Outlook folder is not so easy. First, the info you get from Help is wrong so don’t bother looking. Just move the Outlook.pst file from the default location (Documents&Settings\your user name\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\) to the new location. When you start Outlook it will say the data file is not there and ask where to look. Tell it. Shut down Outlook. Reopen Outlook and make sure it took (my experience is that sometimes it does not), if it did then shut down Outlook again and reboot the system (That is the way of Microsoft, reboot, reboot, reboot…).
SyncBack SE is freeware so just Google it, and download from their website. The only thing I can tell you about it is to run it in Simulation Mode over and over until everything works the way you want it to. If you just let it run and it is not set right then you are going to lose data. You have been warned.
At this point, I have the workstation back up and running with all the critical software installed. I have both the XP-32 installation on C: and the XP-64 installation on D: working with the same My Documents folder on E: so they are accessing the same data, and any work I do in either installation is available in the other. Then as detailed above I have this machine sync’d with the old Athlon box that I am using primarily as a backup server. Everything on the Archive Drive other than the Documents Folder is simply backed up to the Athlon box daily. The Documents folder is synchronized daily.
I have not yet decided what to do about keeping the Thinkpad sync’d with other boxes. It is a cinch that I cannot keep 32gb of documents on its 28gb drive (GRIN!). I guess I can set it up to sync just specific files or folders.
I would like to put the Program Files folders on the E: drive as well so I would not have to reinstall the software. While I primarily only use about a dozen programs there are maybe 50 that I use occasionally and it is a lot of work reloading them all. However some poorly designed programs still install their DLL’s in the Windows folder, so I am not sure this would work well. I guess the thing to do is get everything exactly the way I want and do and image of the installation, and redo that anytime I make a I have been playing around with N-lite and it seems to work OK with XP-32. I have made several trials and still have not gotten exactly what I want in the way of an install disk. However, it looks like an auto install of XP-32, with software, and drives is possible. However, I have been unable to get it to would with XP-64. Run on XP-64 it says it has to be run with a 64bit OS to slipstream SP2 but it will not run at all under XP-64. SIGH! The good old Catch 22.
More than it is worth
Better late than never. I wrote this back at the beginning of the month but apparently hit “Save” rather than “Publish”.
Well the Thinkpad is working right again. Only took 30-40 hours for me to fix it. If I figure my time is only worth $10/hr I have put $300-400 into a computer you can get off eBay for $200.
Seems hardly worth it, does it? But wait, a lot of that time was spent learning new stuff, and a lot of it was actually fun. And since I ran PC Check on it I know the hardware has a clean bill of health. So it is probably worth getting it a new battery, a larger hard drive, and maybe a faster wireless card. Also it now has XP Pro SP3 installed.
What was the problem? Well it turns out that the APCI is not in the BIOS, but is only a driver in software. It became corrupted somehow. For some reason it would not reinstall and I wound up wiping the drive and doing a new install.
That brings me to another pet peeve. Every time I do a new install I have to spend a couple of weeks getting things setup back to the way I like them. So part of this time has been playing with nlite trying to set up a CD to install windows already configured the way I want it to be. So far, 4 tries, it is not there yet. I have been running the trial CD’s on the C: drive. That is an old 40gb WD that has the 32 bit XP on it. The 64 bit system, my main one, is on a 40gb partition on a 320gb drive, the rest of which is the archive partition.
Once I get a set up that I can live with, I will look into fixing it so I can put My Documents and Programs on a separate drive, so an OS upgrade/reinstall will not affect them at all. Just think what it would be like to be able to do a clean install without having to reinstall a single program. A hackers concept of heaven, I am sure.
May is Missing
Well, as you can tell there have been no posts in May. Why? Who knows?
I have been broke, but that does not keep me from writing. I had that auto repair in April and had to borrow against the rent to fix that, so I had to pay double rent in May. Then I had to go down to Charlotte to the dentist, and that doubled my gasoline expense for the month. As everyone knows groceries are out of sight and I do have to eat. So Broke!
Then I have been having computer problems. I did finally get the mother board back from Supermicro, but have not gotten things back exactly as I wanted them. Then I started have problems with the old Thinkpad, it will not go into hibernation. So I have been jumping back and forth between the computers trying to get all that sorted out, and along comes a worm to infest this workstation (BIG SIGH).
I have also been wondering when and if I will ever get that stimulus Payment from the IRS. Checked their website yesterday and they say I will get it towards the end of the month.
Anyway, it seems that if you have a problem it will attract other problems and you end up with a bunch of them all at once.
And, why is it that people who don’t know anything think they have all the answers?