Sorry folks. There'll be no new media this week as my main internet connection is inactive at the moment. Waiting on new hardware to fix that. In the meantime, I'm using an alternative that's slower and has bandwidth restrictions (can't connect to file sharing networks) which fucking sucks. This just happened yesterday of all days. Great timing, life. Hopefully this should be taken care of by next weeks' update. Till then, I'll just be doing some site updating. Moving some files and articles around, updating and renaming some directories, and updating code in some places. Just when I get my new computer live and ready, some bullshit like this goes down. But that's life. Sucks when it wants to, great when it can be. I do have a laptop but that connects to the same shitty connection I'm using now. So hopefully within a week I'll be able to get things back on track for the site.

Alright, you know the specs from a previous article I wrote. And here it all is, put together with no probs:

The main issues I had was that the 3.5” bay is practically useless since I don’t use floppy anymore. And the way that it’s shaped renders putting a card reader there practically impossible for regular usage. The opening may provide more airflow but at the same time, no filter is there, so dust could come in where everyplace else, dust can’t get in easily. Using the wireless laser keyboard and mouse has been great. But you can’t use it initially. You gotta have a standard usb or ps/2 installed first. Then you gotta install the drivers (dl the newer drivers from online rather than using the disc it comes with) and have a fresh pair of batteries installed on the hardware.

An optical ps/2-adapted-to-usb mouse was very slow moving across the screen even at the highest speed setting. That wireless mouse? Man, I love that thing. Works perfectly without a hitch. Reviews you may read online will shit on the technology at times. That may be due to user incompetence which is the case most of the time. Realize that it won’t work till the drivers are installed. You gotta have strong batteries installed and there’s an indicator on the desktop to let you know this. I use rechargeable ones so I know I won’t be having probs with that. The laser hub has to be within range of the hardware and nothing should be blocking its path to communicate with the peripherals. You have to ‘synchronize’ the hardware by pressing the ‘connect’ buttons on them (at the bottom of the keyboard and mouse) so they’ll know how to talk to each other. Caps Lock and Num Lock? That’s another complaint I’ve read about. Neither indicator is on the keyboard itself. Instead, it’s on the laser hub and I don’t have a prob with that.

And the biggest complaint I’ve seen seems to be the precision of the mouse; jumping cursors and not responding to clicks and such. The #1 solution to that, in addition to what I’ve mentioned already, is to use the mouse on a non-reflective surface. If you’re using it on glass or marble, then you’re gonna have probs. Cuz I had the prob and I was using it on a marble surface. It is in a temp location at the moment so I just got a smooth, hard piece of plastic and used that as a temporary mouse pad till I move the new computer to its permanent location with a wooden surface that I know will work. You follow this advice and you shouldn’t have any probs. The only thing I don’t like so far is the placement of the magnifier (at the bottom of the ring finger). I click it by mistake quite often. I suppose it’s something that can be disabled but I didn’t bother. Wasn’t that big of a deal at the moment. Had bigger fish to fry.

You may wonder how I’m typing this up since I’ve had some freezing up issues with my old pc. Guess what? Solved that prob too. And it was so fucking simple that I find it hard to believe I couldn’t figure it out before. The damn pc was running hot and when it got too hot, it froze. All I did was open a side of the case (since mine doesn’t breathe well) so that the heat had a better avenue of escape and I haven’t had a freezing issue since. More dust will get in now but I have canned air to take care of that. I don’t have any system indicators to tell me about temperature and fan speed and all that shit cuz I’ve never had a prob with it till these last few weeks. I’m a power user now as opposed to before, I was a casual user. All the shit that I do caught up with me. With those changes in computing habits comes a need for a computer that can handle what I do now.

I had my Vista x64 drivers dl’ed ahead of time for the various hardware I had. I started up the new computer and had my BIOS update ready to install via removable disk. Nice option. Did that as properly as I thought I could do it as far as settings. Then came time to install my OS. I chose Vista x64 so I could utilize the full functionality of my computer. I dl’ed this version: Microsoft.Windows.Vista.Ultimate.x64.Integrated.January.2008.OEM.DVD-BIE via BitTorrent on Shareaza. Was dl’ing fine but got hung up at 94% with 4.04gb dl’ed out of around 4.2gb total. Stayed like that for a couple days actually. So I deleted that and dl’ed it again. Same results. Plus the completion and downloaded percentage kept going backwards. I didn’t know what the fuck was up with that so I did some research. Found this article on the Shareaza wiki and gave their advice a try. None of it worked.

I’ve never had a prob downloading a torrent with Shareaza so I said to hell with that torrent and went the http route. I searched for that file via share4vn.com and found several sites that had it. I tried a Megashares link 1^st but that service blows balls cuz the download cuts off at 250mb and if you don’t have a dl manager, you’re screwed. Too much bullshit with that. Did a search for a valid email and pin # to use their Link Card service but came up with expired ones that didn’t work. So I tried other sites and found this one. It uses filefactory links and all of them worked for me. They were 99mbs a pop. The last one was about 75mbs. None of them work anymore so I guess I lucked out. I was dl’ing on two computers to speed up the process. Got ‘em all but did get an occasional “server is busy” error from the site. Just kept trying the links and they worked eventually. Also, if you dl too much, it’ll tell you to wait about 30 minutes before it allows you to dl more files. A dynamic ip addy fixes that prob easily.

The site with the links also said it requires a password to unrar the files but it didn’t. The file originated here I suppose but the links are all dead. Guess somebody ratted ‘em out. I managed to get ‘em all, unrar ‘em and it’s more rar’ed files. Unrar’ed those and got even more rar’ed files and .r30 (and on) files. I’m familiar with the process so I unpacked those and lo and behold, there was an iso hidden within all that. I unpacked it and used vLite (cuz it was recommended) to burn a bootable iso. Burned and installed fine without a hitch.

One thing about vLite though, for me at least, the .exe wouldn’t dl from the home site. I tried different browsers and dl methods and nothing worked. So I searched for their latest version (1.1.1 at the time) and MajorGeeks had it and it dl’ed and installed perfectly fine but you gotta have at least .NET Framework 2.0 installed if you have an XP or earlier computer. You have to unpack the iso in order to burn a bootable disk. But keep the iso cuz you’re gonna need it for a successful burn. I used a slower write speed to make sure there were no burn errors. vLite gives you the option to remove Vista components but I opted out of doing that. One, cuz I wanted full functionality and I’d decide on my own later what I’d wanna keep and what I’d wanna ditch. Two, I wanted the burn to be successful.

During all this, I did learn that FAT32 drives are limited to storing single files up to 4gb in size. Let’s say you got one big 4gb file. Anything over that can’t be stored on a FAT32 drive. But if you got several files that total up to that much or more, you’ll be fine. Now I understand why when shooting vids with certain equipment, they won’t allow a single file size to exceed 4gb, no matter what the capacity of your storage card is.

So I got all the hardware hooked up and ready to go. OS burned to dvd. I had to find a place in my pad for testing purposes cuz all the boxes made it kinda cramped in here. I do got a little efficiency after all. I managed to make some room and installed the OS, no serial or activation required like what was expected. But I kept getting a BSOD. Over and over again. I took out the tv tuner hardware just in case that could’ve been the prob. It wasn’t. Safe mode didn’t help worth a shit either. I reset my BIOS to load default settings and that at least let me boot up properly to the desktop where I proceeded to install my display drivers. Restarted after that and what do you know…BSOD.

I either got no error message or the IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error message. It was telling me to check my drivers, which I did, but offered no solutions. And how the hell could it be my drivers when everything was compatible with everything else? I hit the net for an answer. You know those numbers at the bottom that look like this: 0x0000000A? I searched for those. That was one of ‘em. The other was 0x0000007B. I deducted that it was some kind of hardware error but couldn’t think of what the fuck it could possibly be. Then I remembered reading a comment on Newegg.com about fresh Vista installs. Someone recommended to install only 2gb of memory, start up, shut down, then install the rest of your memory to avoid start up errors. So I did a little research on that and turns out that’s exactly what the prob was.

It’s a known issue and Microsoft has all the details here. I dl’ed and installed it and no more BSOD. Booting up now was faster than I thought it would be. I did go back and optimize my BIOS settings too. I updated all the hardware drivers and was all ready to get started with installing other software and to get online. One issue was that the OS hang for a while for no reason. It’d just freeze up and there’d be nothing you could do till it stopped. I relate this to the multitude of start up programs. Most of which are probably completely unnecessary but I didn’t feel like going in and figuring out what I needed and what I didn’t. I’ll do that with my next install. All that bullshit was sucking up 20% of my available memory and I had 4gb installed!

Once the freezing up was over, I really wanted a good firewall and antivirus program. Preferably something with clean up utilities integrated. I use System Suite 7 Pro on this XP SP2 x86 computer I’m using now and I love the way it works. Lots of features, simple interface, easy configuration, and does what it says it’s supposed to do. I thought I’d give version 8 a try but the firewall won’t work on an x64 system. Other utilities won’t either like the registry cleaner. It just goes into a loop of ‘initializing.’ I also noticed it doesn’t have an uninstaller like version 7. I checked Avanquest’s support site and it only works with a 32 bit system. Fuck! So now I had to do even more research to find something that would actually work properly with an x64 system. I tried out BitDefender Total Security 2008 and Comodo Firewall Pro 3.0. Windows Firewall was disabled.

I selected those two based on online reviews and recommendations. BitDefender was first. I got their x64 version by digging around and found their download page here. Got a working serial online that was good for about a year so it could connect to the net and update itself without worrying about the program getting locked out. It installed just fine and all but the fucking firewall didn’t work. The status indicator would alert you that part of the security wasn’t working. I think it showed a white ‘x’ in a red circle if I remember correctly. All the reconfiguring in the world wouldn’t make this go away. Plus it was a bit of a resource hog since it had some startups and integrated itself into parts of the system. So I uninstalled it and tried Comodo.

I dl’ed and installed x64 build 3.0.17.304 and it was a pretty big pain in the ass. It actually hijacks your network drivers and installs its own and miniport drivers. Vista does warn that the drivers aren’t signed and not to install them. I did anyway and learned my lesson that I shouldn’t have. The common error displayed under system status, and this is a known and unfixed issue with them, is ‘the network firewall is not functioning properly!’ Meaning that the firewall simply won’t start up, for one. I attributed this to the Defense+ portion after some playing around, so I disabled it. And that’s when the firewall started working. But the prob was I couldn’t connect to the net due to this program’s hijacking. Calls itself learning how you use your computer when you have it set to training mode but that’s a bunch of crap. Too much interactivity required with this firewall. Gotta allow this program, that driver. Fuck all that bullshit, man.

I figured out through the device manager that Comodo hijacked my network hardware due to multiple yellow exclamation points present under ‘network adapters.’ Uninstalling and disabling them does no good as you might as well be doing that to the actual hardware installed. I deduced that it was a driver issue. And it was. inspect.sys is the Comodo driver that fucks everything up. I uninstalled that, did a restart, reinstalled my network hardware to be on the safe side, and was back in biz. I could connect to the net again.

Windows firewall allowed the System Suite 8 I had installed originally to connect to Avanquest and it locked up the program. I wasn’t happy about that. I did temporarily reinstall it for the antivirus and spyware though. Windows Defender was active too. My only firewall choice at that point was the crappy Windows Firewall. But I wasn’t gonna try and use it again until I knew I could block outgoing connections so that System Suite wouldn’t lock up again and that’d result in me being exposed to anyone on the net.

Windows Firewall touts that it has two-way protection. Wasn’t working like that for me. So I dug around and found out about Windows Firewall with Advanced Security. It’s not hard to find when you know about its existence and where to look. But the general computer user wouldn’t have a clue. Neither did I. Full documentation on what it is, how to configure it, etc, can be found here via a word document direct from Microsoft. It’s a tad complicated but if you find yourself in a bind, there’s plenty of resources online that explains things in lay terms. Did the firewall block the outgoing connection I wanted it to? Yes. So I can confirm that when properly configured, it works. A two-way firewall is what you’ll need if you have cracked software. Actually, it’s what you’ll want regardless. More secure.

I wouldn’t call this ordeal a disappointment or a pain in the ass so much as I’d call it a learning experience. I know stuff now that I never would’ve known before. Really, that’s how I know all the computer and tech stuff that I know. Trial and error. What’s fucked up is that not soon after I burned the x64 disc that the sp1 version came out: Microsoft.Windows.Vista.x64.SP1.OEM.DVD-BIE. It took a few days for that to dl, but it did. 3.7gb total. And I’ll be seeding it for a few more days from the date of this post cuz I know how much of a pain it can be to get the whole thing dl’ed due to its size. Won’t burn that till probably the weekend. But I’m confident it’ll work.