iTunes doesn’t seem to play very well with Vista yet…

And that was a fresh start of iTunes, after it refused to play anything… Everything would work, it would even tell me it was playing… but no sound came out, and it didn’t move the progress bar.

It works well *most* of the time, but it crashes a lot more than it used to do when I had XP

I refuse to use anything else though; I’ll just wait until a patch is released

Edit: Seems to be working fine now – I think it was partially caused by a dodgy plugin.

Every now and then, when Windows crashes, and I have to reset my PC, the motherboard only detects 1 or 2 of my 4 SATA2 hard disks. It’s always the ones connected to the 3rd and 4th sockets (so it says on the board), but these are actually the 1st and 2nd devices as seen by both Windows and Linux.

So today, after removing 2 currently un-used and un-powered drives from the case, I swapped the cables around (and tidied them using some spare spiral wrap), so that it would stop moving the main boot drive to be third in the boot order preference list.

But of course, Windows didn’t like this, and I got an ever-so-helpful message on boot:

NTLDR is missing.
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart.

The fix was easy, I just swapped the cables back.

while ($system->has_changed()) { show_unhelpful_error_message(); }

Grub (The standard Linux boot loader) can handle you moving drives around… It barely blinked on mine; it just said “invalid path” (or something along those lines), and was very easy to correct.

But Windows? Oh no! That’s far to difficult… *sigh*.

About two weeks ago I ordered myself a new laptop and a water-proof backpack for it. After some problems between LaptopShop and my bank, it eventually arrived here on Thursday afternoon

I booted it up, went through all the Windows XP OOBE stuff and then the Acer software installation wizards, created the recovery DVD and then formatted it with an nLited XP Pro CD, which I created from an ISO provided by my University’s MSDN. It installed fine, but it took me a while to find the drivers for the hardware and then copy them over on my USB stick. After that I had to call up Microsoft as I had activated the XP code on a VMWare installation – I forget why :P Once Windows was done with all the software I like, and then put Fedora Core 6 on the 25GB free space I had left while formatting.

I copied over my Steam installation from my PC, and a couple of other games – I tried Half Life 2 at 1280×800 (Widescreen): I got over 60FPS on it… Considering this is a laptop, that’s amazing
GTI Racing was a similar story, once I’d stopped it trying to load at 1280×1024 – runs perfectly at 1024×768 (no widescreen support).
Need for Speed: Most Wanted didn’t work so well – not that I really expected it to. It runs *ok* at 800×600 and medium settings, but nothing more. I didn’t buy the laptop for gaming though – it’s for writing notes, coding on, and other stuff I need it for at University.

After doing all the above on it, it was quite late, and I went to bed, leaving it plugged in to get a really thorough first charge. However, when I woke up, and tried to turn the laptop on, it refused to even make so much as a beep or idle whirring noise!

The power LEDs under the “on” button and on the front panel flashes for a fraction of a second when I try and turn it on, but nothing else happens. So I’ve been in contact with Acer Support several times, and they asked me to send the charger back – they will then test it, and either send me a new one, or repair/replace the laptop, if it isn’t the charger that’s causing the problem.

However I borrowed a multi-laptop charger (one of those £100 iGo things with about 15 different “tips”) and tested my laptop on it, but it didn’t charge properly, nor would it turn on. So it would seem that it’s the laptop that’s broken. So I will send Acer back the laptop, not the charger… Hopefully they’ll fix or replace the broken part(s) quickly, and not send me a new laptop – I don’t want to have to reinstall all my stuff, and spend 20 minutes on the phone with Microsoft again :P

Because of this problem, I haven’t been able to test stuff like the battery life, or even how good movies look on the screen (games look great though) – I will update this post when I have a working laptop again

Well it’s just been released, and so far I love it

Apart from the lack of add-ons (extensions appear to have been renamed) compatible yet, it’s really good. The new skin is nice too, but is gonna need replacing with something that blends in better with my SoftCrystal Linux WindowBlinds theme. There’s a built-in spell checker in text boxes, and much better tab/window handling – it can now remember (or so it says) what tabs and/or windows you had open in your last session, and restore them!

So far, I haven’t noticed any memory leaks – I hope it stays that way! The feeds system is also a lot better – I never really used to use it as it was quite hard to add a new feed so it would show as a pop-up menu – it seems a lot better now

I’ll update this post with any extra stuff I find, as I find it.

Update: There is a new extensions, or rather add-ons manager. It’s a lot nicer than the old one, and it seems to check for updates when you start the browser, and offers to update them then and there, and it doesn’t need a restart (as it’s not yet fully loaded) afterwards

Get Firefox!

I bought myself one terrabyte of new storage last week from eBuyer, as well as an extra fan to cool the disks

I ran into a couple of problems, the primary one being that I can’t use the built-in RAID controller on my motherboard, as it’s only SATA1, not SATA2, which is twice the speed. The drives do work on SATA1, but that defeats the purpose of buying fast drives! So I’m left with some left-over drives, as I can only plug in 4 at a time.

As it happens one of the four new drives has a big problem. Windows installed onto it very slowly, and it had issues… The PC would just freeze doing pretty much anything. So I’ve arranged to RMA it for a refund from eBuyer

But everything is fine now – I have a 200GB partition for Windows, my profile folder and programs, and a 30GB partition for Linux (and a 2GB swap partition for Linux too). Another 250GB drive for downloads, and the last one for Games. My other 250GB drive has my music and some old backups on it.

The next motherboard I buy will have at least 8 SATA2 (or better, if SATA3/4/5… is out by then!) ports, as well as at least 4 SATA2+ ports on a RAID controller to allow for future expansion

So the grand total of storage capacity I have here, and in my colocated server, comes to about 2.5TB*

* It would be more, but my 300GB Maxtor Onetouch died recently.