I Love My New Computer. I Hate Windows 8.1

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I’m typing on the new computer I ‘built’ a few weeks ago. It’s ‘built,’ not built, because I didn’t actually put the components into their slots. That honor went to a tech at Fry’s. It was built with parts I specified after lots of research and angst. It is custom in every sense of the word.

In nearly every respect this box performs better than anticipated. Because its system drive is an SSD, instead of a mechanical hard drive, it boots in under 20 seconds. Photoshop, a major beast of a program, lights up in under three seconds!

The system was built to manipulate stills and videos while being quiet. It does both very well. High def video is often rendered faster than its realtime running length!

Having two 1920×1080 monitors (which I bought at BestBuy) has given me loads of desktop real estate, making nearly everything I do easier. Two, three, four or more programs can be open simultaneously. That’s a web design game changer.

All that being said, Windows 8.1 is the weakest link. For a longtime Windows user this latest Microsoft iteration is non-intuitive while adding extra steps and hoops to jump through.

What were they thinking?

The problem is Windows 8 was built to be used in touchscreen and keyboard scenarios. It comes up short when you are forced to use actions more suitable to a tablet on a keyboard and mouse computer. It is frustrating.

My friend Peter Mokover is in the final stages of building a similar computer. He asked which OS to use, Windows 7 or 8.1?&#185 I’m not sure.

Windows 7 is a better bet right now. But, as a geek, it’s tough to not use the latest operating system which is still in active development. I won’t be surprised if he grits his teeth and goes with Windows 8.1, even knowing it’s bad.

For my purposes (and Peter’s) a Windows alternative is not an option. Too many of the specialized programs we need only run on this platform.

For most general users who basically surf and read email, Microsoft is shooting themselves in the foot! Nowadays web based apps are replacing OS specific programs. This debacle will only push more people to Android or Apple’s OSX and IOS.

Here’s my rundown:

  • Windows 8.1 (x64) (build 9600)
  • CPU: 3.50 gigahertz Intel Core i7-4770K
  • Motherboard: Z87-G45 GAMING (MS-7821) 1.0
  • RAM: 16328 Megabytes Usable Installed Memory
  • Drive: Samsung SSD 840 EVO 250GB [Hard drive] (250.06 GB) — drive 0
  • Drive: WDC WD2002FAEX-007BA0 [Hard drive] (2000.40 GB) — drive 1
  • Video: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 [Display adapter]
  • Monitor (2): AOC 2367 [Monitor] (23.1″vis, s/n BEGD89A000462, August 2013)
  • Case: Thermaltake Soprano

&#185 – Windows 8.1 is a free, service upgrade to Windows 8 after the original cry from users. It is a small, incremental improvement over the original.

I’m About To Perform The Great Linux Experiment On Helaine’s Laptop

I can reload Windows XP and take the chance of it happening again or just maybe I can switch her to the virtually virus free Ubuntu Linux.

Helaine’s laptop is infected again! Though I’ve removed most of the infection her browser is still being hijacked. Google results bring spammy non-Google ‘search’ sites. There’s surely stuff I can’t find. Other functions like sound are no longer reliable.

This virus is so good it managed to shut off Microsoft’s own Windows Security Essentials program! Thanks Bill.

This is not Helaine’s fault! Considering where I found most of the infected files it looks like she was fed an infected Java jar. It probably came from an otherwise trustworthy website via an infected ad.

A day after the infection Java posted one of their ‘too damn often’ security updates. Come to think of it Microsoft was in the midst of rolling out Security Essentials 2 then too. Coincidence? I think not.

I have two choices. I can reload Windows XP and take the chance of it happening again or just maybe I can switch her to the virtually virus free Ubuntu Linux.

She was at first skeptical. OK, she was skeptical at second too. Linux sounds geeky.

Certainly there will be a different look and different programs to use. Her browser will remain the same. Her email program will change.

Helaine is primarily a web browser. She doesn’t run very many discrete programs. Those she does use have native Linux versions or claim to run through WINE the Windows emulator.

Linux comes with a ‘live’ version allowing a quick try without committing to an installation. I loaded the CD and it works.

Tonight I’ll back up Helaine’s files and install Ubuntu. Wish me luck.

Better still wish Helaine luck.

With Computers Nothing Goes Smoothly

I could feel it as the mouse pointer began to lag behind the mouse. Then audio came out as if a 78 rpm record was playing at 33 rpm (old reference–I know).

pc-box-wires.jpgThe new PC fired up the first time! Windows 7, thought not a painless install, also went in pretty easily. Of course, being the consummate pessimist I waited for the other shoe to drop.

5 – 4 – 3 – 2- 1 Bingo! The computer to begin to crawl.

The mouse pointer began to lag behind the mouse. There’s an interesting connect here because you feel something you’re really not feeling! Then audio came out as if a 78 rpm record was playing at 33 rpm (old reference–I know).

When something like this happens Google is your friend. If you can enter the right terms you’ll find someone else who’s felt your pain and, hopefully, found the solution.

I could find nothing!

The problem doesn’t come on at boot. It waits before happening.

busy-box-computer.jpgThe voltages and temperatures seemed fine. The CPU was running OK. My power supply is very beefy with more than enough power to run this machine (and a small town). It was all very puzzling.

Maybe it was a problem with Windows 7? I reformatted the hard drive and loaded Windows XP SP3. Time consuming, but painless. I’ve installed and re-installed this OS dozens of times.

Things started fine but withing a few minutes I realized I’d pissed away my time. The machine was crawling.

I think (but still am not sure) the problem is an internal card reader bought for under $10 on eBay.

Once I get this problem stabilized and eliminated I can begin to optimize the BIOS and get this thing screaming. I did run a short benchmark and the results were stunningly fast.

A few more days–I hope.

More Monitors–More Pixels

It looked like it would be a plug-and-play cakewalk–and it was!

dual-monitor-setup.jpg

Far be it for my parents to come for a visit and not bring a gift. In this case it was a 19″ LCD monitor my dad no longer uses. Because of his eyesight he has switched to a 22″ behemoth which he runs at fairly low resolution.

This monitor has been a long time coming. At one point they were thinking of mailing it. They found out that would cost about the same as a new monitor! It flew with them in a shopping bag.

My Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS video card, an older card which is fine as long as I don’t become a gamer, has two outputs. Windows XP supports multiple monitors. It looked like it would be a plug-and-play cakewalk–and it was!

Configuring two monitors on one computer isn’t without some difficulties. A single screen stretched over two LCDs doesn’t quite know what to do when you maximize a browser or other window. Programs which throw a splash screens across the middle of the screen now straddle both!

After a while I reconfigured the video card to operate in Dualview. It’s never explained very well, but one monitor is the primary. It sees most opening programs first. Maximizing fills one monitor, not both. Programs can easily be dragged from one to the other.

I was still unhappy because the clock and task bar only showed on one monitor. I found and installed the free version of MultiMonitor Taskbar. Problem solved!

My only remaining problem is a physical one. The two monitors aren’t at the same height. A piece of wood should fix that or maybe I’ll move the power strip elsewhere.

Does having two monitors make a difference? Oh yeah! That’s especially true with Photoshop where I always had overlapping dialog boxes. Now everything is comfortably spread out. My resolution went from 1280×1024 to 2560×1024.

My friend Bob in Florida has four monitors. That’s a little over the top… right now. However, I seriously understand why he does it.

Stef’s Laptop Dead And Gone

Unlike a desktop I can’t open this Dell 600m and replace components.

I would guess I worked 15-20 hours on Stef’s laptop. After being on for a while programs would randomly ramp up to 100% of the available CPU cycles. Everything would slow down to a crawl.

I ran every diagnostic program known to man (thanks for all your suggestions). No help. Then, this weekend, I wiped the hard drive clean and reloaded Windows XP. It ran fine… until Stef began to use it. Bam! It was redlining again.

My guess is, and it’s only a guess, there’s some hardware component that goes a little nuts after being stressed or heated. If that’s the case there’s nothing I can do. Unlike a desktop I can’t open this Dell 600m and replace components.

I checked the ads in Sunday’s paper and Stef headed out to Circuit City (one day prior to their bankruptcy) near her campus. She came home with a 15.4 inch HP with Vista, an AMD dual-core CPU and even hard disk space to last her a li9fetime. It will serve her well, though it’s a shame to be rushed like this.

The new laptop has Norton anti-virus software. Her school demands McAfee before it will allow her to log onto the on-campus network. These are programs that don’t like each other and don’t want to be removed. What a pain–and slow.

Before her old computer started acting funky I backed up her documents, photos and music. Tonight I’ll go in with Hamachi and move the files as if she was in the same room.

I really wish I knew what went wrong.

Reinstalling Windows XP

Everything went fine until Windows discovered my hard drive. Instead of 620 Gb it was reporting 131069 Mb. As I’d later find out the original XP disk only supports drives that big.

A few nights ago the main hard drive on my main desktop machine started making loud knocking sounds. Uh oh. Not good. Dead! Luckily I had recentlly backed up my photos, the only things I really needed. This seemed like a good time to reinstall XP and get a fresh start.

Maybe you are organized. Not me. My PC is as sloppy as my office–and that’s pretty darned sloppy. Starting from scratch is a convenient way to throw out a lot of crap.

I went online and found a 620 Gb hard drive. I was really tempted to get a 1 Tb, but the 620 Gb was on sale for a good price and had excellent reviews on the Newegg site. I find Newegg’s buyer reviews believable because I’ve seen so many that knock the product!

the drive itself was under $80 with free 3-day shipping. I ordered Thursday afternoon. UPS delivered it Friday afternoon. Sweet.

This machine was hand built by me and over time had accumulated 5-hard drives. I opened the case and pulled them out. Then I pulled out my original XP CDROM for the install. I’d like a dollar for every time I’ve installed Windows.

This was about the time my mechanical reconfiguration noise woke Helaine. That’s not good.

Everything went fine until Windows discovered my hard drive. Instead of 620 Gb it was reporting 131069 Mb. As I’d later find out the original XP disk only supports drives that big. Back when XP came out no one had dreamed of throwing terrabytes of memory in a desktop machine.

I ended up at Paul Thurrott’s amazing SuperSite for Windows.where I was walked through the process of ‘slipsteaming’ Service Pack 2 into my original disk. Well, almost. The current version is Service Pack 3 and my CDROM burning software doesn’t actually support what needs to be done. A few ad libs and I was on my way.

At the moment Windows XP SP3 is installing with the full hard drive recognized. It’s going along very smoothly! I’m sure something will come up to slow me down.

In the meantime, I have discovered one hard drive is a lot quieter than five.

The Tech Support Guy

If you have your PC password protected, I have bad news. With a quickly downloaded copy of the “Emergency Boot and Recovery Disk,” I logged on and was in control of users and passwords in under five minutes!

I am the tech support guy. I usually have a computer or two hanging around the house, needing repairs. These come from friends and associates. It’s a challenge, which means I enjoy it.

My friend Farrell’s mom’s machine is on the floor next to me. Once a very pricey Fujitsu, this laptop is getting a little long in the tooth. It was gunked up with a little spyware and some tiny applets; only a problem in the aggregate.

There was one other problem. Ruth had somehow locked the computer with user name and password she didn’t know!

If you have your PC password protected, I have bad news. With a quickly downloaded copy of the “Emergency Boot and Recovery Disk,” I logged on and was in control of users and passwords in under five minutes!

I told the family the laptop would benefit from more memory… but it’s at its design limit already.

It will work and do everything Ruth wants. It will do it more slowly than I’d like.

She would actually be the perfect candidate for Linux, though I haven’t (and probably won’t) mention it. It’s a little less CPU intensive than Windows XP, meaning it will be faster, and it has all the applications she wants and uses.

Linux still scares most users who cling to the belief Microsoft is some sort of gold standard. Of course, to me Linux is worn as a geek merit badge.

One thing I did do was install logmein. Next time, the repair is done via remote control! There are now seven machines I can operate from home.

A Couple Of Guys Go To Broadway

Helaine and Stef left Saturday morning. The ‘Stalker Tour’ is on the move with Rick Springfield concerts in Boston and Laconia, NH. They’ve taken “Clicky,” my Canon Digital Rebel camera, with them.

That left Saturday as a pretty hollow day for me. Luckily, I knew someone else who was being ‘abandoned.’ Matt Scott’s wife and daughter were leaving town for Mississippi.

He and I decided to head to New York City and see a show.

If you carry a fishing pole, people just assume you’re a fisherman. If you go to a Broadway show… a Broadway musical… a Sondhein musical… they assume you’re gay! I know this because virtually everyone who heard we were going either commented or asked.

All I could think of was the time I went to the theater and stood in line behind a guy wearing a t-shirt which said, “I can’t even think straight!”

Just as there are black Republicans, there are straight guys who enjoy the theater.

Since Matt was dropping his wife and daughter at LaGuardia Airport, I took the train to the city. I would walk crosstown and we’d meet outside the theater.

Taking the train from New Haven is very easy. Unfortunately, it’s also quite a long trip. Union Station to Grand Central Terminal is around 1:45&#185. I brought the NY Times, a photo magazine and my $30 camcorder.

I didn’t have “Clicky,” but I did want to try and make a short video essay. It was supposed to be about the day in general. Unfortunately, I didn’t budget properly and my video ran out as I approached the theater!

My New York City travelogue video is at the bottom of this entry. It was entirely shot on the $30 camcorder and edited using Windows Movie Maker (included on every Windows XP or Vista computer). The music is “Look Busy” by Kevin MacLeod.

Yesterday’s show was Steven Sondheim’s Company. This is a revival of the 1970 musical about Bobby (Ra&#250l Esperza), a bachelor, the three single women in his life and his five married couple friends.

What made this musical more interesting was how it was cast. There was no orchestra pit because the actors were also playing instruments on-stage!

This must have been a casting nightmare. Finding good actors is one thing. Finding good musicians is another. But finding people who can sing, dance and act (often simultaneously) really limits your choices. I, for instance, would be 0 for 3!

With all this going, the cast was dynamite. I especially enjoyed Ra&#250l Esperza, (Bobby) who reminds me of Bradley Whitford (Studio 60, West Wing) and Angel Desai (Marta).

The show is funny, but often poignant and sad, as it traces Bobby’s life from his 35th to 36 th birthday. Being a grown-up bachelor has its good and bad points. Being single doesn’t remove you from emotional tumult.

I’d recommend going to see it, but as I type this, they are nearly an hour into Company’s last Broadway performance. Luckily, yesterday’s matin

Windows Vista – Not Again

I went to do something on my laptop with Windows Vista last night and got shot down. This is starting to upset me.

It was a simple thing. I have a Bluetooth headset. I wanted to be able to use it with Skype or the ‘dictation’ feature of the operating system. I bought a cheap Bluetooth USB dongle&#185 and plugged it in. With shipping we’re talking $13, so this wasn’t a major investment.

In Windows XP, it would have worked flawlessly. In Vista, the driver installation failed. And, there is no other Vista driver for my device without paying more than the dongle itself cost!

This follows on the heels of my discovery either Dell or Microsoft turned off the ability to record directly from a WAV file or internal computer line input. Best example would be recording audio from a TV show I was watching on my laptop.

Again, in XP, this was built in and robust. Now, it’s gone.

When I read other comments about either of these two problems all I see is frustration from others. I guess that’s the WOW factor Microsoft was talking about.

&#185 – Hey, I don’t name this stuff.

Vista – A User’s Observation

Now that my laptop’s no longer brand new, I suppose I can talk a little about my experiences with Windows Vista. Vista is a hot topic on many geek boards.

The laptop itself is a joy to use. I know Dell is no longer the darling it once was, but this laptop performs just as well as I’d anticipated. With 2Gb RAM, a reasonably large hard drive and very high resolution screen&#185 it’s sweet.

Vista is not as nice!

Maybe it’s growing pains. Maybe it’s just no one likes change. Maybe things weren’t well thought out. Whatever the reason, Vista is nowhere near as easily operated as Windows XP was.

I know of at least three programs I want to run but can’t, because they’re not Vista compatible. I sense it’s not just these individual pieces of software, but whole classes of programs which have to deal with Vista’s architecture.

Kaspersky virus software (I have used the freeware AOL version) won’t load. Neither will Nero, the disk writing software. I used to use Nero a lot.

I bought a wireless remote control to allow me to control PowerPoint presentations from afar. They say there will be Vista software – just not now. The remote’s currently a paperweight.

My poker software from FullTilt is also Vista challenged. The sound and video are no longer in sync. Cards will come to me, I’ll make a bet and then the signal “ding” will sound telling me it’s my time to act… though I already have.

Just as troubling is Vista’s ‘improved’ security. As far as I can tell, all that means is asking me incessantly if I approve of what’s going. Usually, I know the correct answer. I assume less sophisticated users will not and just say “Yes.”

Microsoft has been advertising Vista as having a WOW factor, based on its Aero interface. I certainly don’t think there’s any functional difference with Aero. And, some programs have problems properly displaying in this Aero configuration. I have never seen a reason to use the 3D floating windows feature that Aero is known for.

There are more troubles when it comes to files. I still haven’t figured out how to allow my networked computers to write files to and from the Vista machine. One program I use, which tries to write data into it’s own directory, is thwarted by Vista’s security ‘features.’

Even worse, Windows Explorer has devolved to be less friendly and less usable.

Like I said, I like the laptop a lot. Using a free program from a Scandanavian developer, I now do most of my DVR watching on this machine. I’ve also used it with Photoshop and Picasa to manipulate photos with no regrets.

But Vista – it’s just not ready yet.

&#185 – I have one of those newer glossy screens. It is more prone to glare than the original matte LCDs.

Another Sick PC

One of the folks from work asked me if I’d take a look at his PC, which I did this weekend. I was worried enough to make sure there were no other active machines on my network as it booted up. Good move.

No sooner did I turn it on, than pop-ups for adult web sites began to appear. I attempted to open some utilities, but the computer hardly acknowledged my clicks. It was slower than sluggish.

A quick check revealed there was a lot I didn’t recognize in the start-up folder and task manager. Not a good sign.

Usually I go after these thing methodically. I wonder if it’s even worth it in this case? There’s nothing of real value on here – a few kids games which can be reinstalled.

There were few, if any, updates performed. It’s still Windows XP SP1! On the Internet, this box didn’t stand a chance. It was probably infected within minutes as it sat and idled.

It’s a Compaq, which I think has a restore partition on the hard drive. If that’s right, I can just spin it back to day one.

Oh, Compaq… you should be ashamed of yourself, letting this XP PC ship with only 128 mb. Sure, it will work, but just barely. I’ll try and pick up another 512 mb to get thing a little snappier.

It’s good to be the geek, but it’s depressing to see what can happen to nice people who did no wrong.

Help Me Buy A Laptop

It’s time to buy a new laptop. I don’t want to spend a lot. I want everything. Are they necessarily mutually exclusive?

Let me throw this out now – your advice is solicited and will be appreciated. Where to buy? What to buy? Any tidbit!

I might not do what you suggest, but I can assure you, right now I don’t know what to do!

Helaine and Stef both have Dell laptops, which they’re happy with. I am using a very old (PII 300 128 mb RAM) Dell laptop which is built like a tank! I had a Sony and it always seemed fragile.

With all that experience, Dell seems logical. I’m willing to consider anything.

I want a small laptop with a high resolution screen. I’ve looked at the Dell Inspiron E1405 with a 14.1″ screen and the WXGA+ upgrade (1440×900 pixels). Maybe a 12″ screen would be OK too, though I’m not sure I want to give up the pixels (though I’d gladly give up the pounds).

Dell offers loads of choices for the CPU (the ‘brains’ in the package), but there’s very little documentation to actually explain the difference between any two. What’s the difference between a Core Duo, Core 2 Duo and Pentium dual core?

The same goes with the new four flavored Windows Vista. How ‘deep’ into their marketing must I plunge to know which is which? I think Vista Home Premium will be fine – though I’d just as soon use Windows XP (or Linux, if I could get away with it… which I can’t).

Since I do a lot of photo editing, I suppose more memory is better – maybe 2Gb? I really don’t know. I’ve heard varying things on how memory intensive and efficient Vista is.

I am extremely disappointed with Dell’s website. No matter what I enter, I am unsure if I’m getting the best deal! There are always coupon codes listed on websites like FatWallet and Techbargains, but I’ve never seen them really bring the price down. If you add those online discounts, you lose Dell’s seemingly automatic discounts. And, it would seem, no one really pays the posted price.

Also, Dell’s site does a terrible job in explaining the differences in the CPUs that are available. The site has links that promise this info, but fall terribly short.

As a Dell stockholder (minor position in my retirement account) I am disappointed that their website makes the buying process more, not less, confusing! If it’s baffling to me, a knowledgeable power user, how do neophytes know what they’re looking at?

Anyway, advice is being sought. Let the games begin. Aloha.

Tech Support Times Three

I have three tech support stories to tell. Two are brief, the third is not. They all have relatively happy endings.

The first concerns a phone call I received yesterday from the company that provides much of the on-air weather equipment we use at work. We’d had a terrible problem, which they fixed. Now they wanted some log files.

The logs were needed because they fixed the problem, but weren’t sure how!

That sounds terrible, though it’s not as unusual as it seems. Points to them for asking me to send the files. These log will help them understand what they did for us, so they can do it for everyone.

The second story concerns my laptop. It is, in computer time, ancient. There’s a sticker on the front attesting to the fact that it was designed for Windows 98!

If you’re technically inclined, it’s a PII-300 with 128 mb of RAM for memory and 2 mb more for video.

If that was a meaningless blur, it’s got about the same horsepower as a tricycle.

A while ago, I upgraded it to a heavily customized version Windows XP. I carefully turned off as much as I could to preserve as much of this machine’s minimal power as was possible. It’s still a hog.

This has been a hacker machine for me. I’ve experimented with it by swapping hard drives in and out. Until today it had a tiny 8 gb drive.

With a weekend trip coming up, I wanted more storage, so I swapped in a 20 gb drive last night. Windows XP was on the drive, so I freshened some programs with newer versions and then went to reboot.

Before the power went off, Windows told me it had to install some updates… 57 updates!

Are they serious? Sure, this drive had been out of service for a while, but were there really that many updates (mostly security related) to XP? And this version had already been inoculated with SP2 and other fixes.

I took a shower while the laptop did its thing.

Tech support story three is a little more troubling. It started with phone calls from Matt Scott, one of our meteorologists at the TV station.

When he went to fire up his Dell desktop machine, it quickly crashed into a Blue Screen of Death or BSOD! The BSOD screen is cryptic, but it hinted at problems with the boot sector. That’s serious.

Before Matt got to me, he had spoken with Dell tech support. Their solution, after a few tests, was to send the drive to a forensic computer lab where, for $1,800, it could be resurrected!

He brought the PC in to work and Jeff Bailey, our webuy, began to work on it. I did some scouting around Google and found what typically causes this particular BSOD.

HINT: If you ever have a computer problem, write down exactly what’s on the screen and search for it on Google. You are not the first person with this problem. You can often find solutions just by looking. It’s very important to search for the exact words you see.

“Matt, do you have any disks that came with the PC,” I asked. My suspicion was, Dells don’t come with disks… and it hadn’t.

I went through the station looking for a Windows XP CD. Yes, what I was doing probably violates some stipulation in the end user licensing agreement – sue me.

By the time I returned with the disk, Bailey had the machine on its side. A panel had been removed from the case, exposing the innards to the world. As it turns out, that wasn’t necessary, though it makes Jeff and me look like &#252ber Geeks (as if knowing how to make a “&#252” on the screen isn’t enough).

Computer repair is modern day sorcery. You must follow a number of steps, none actually documented, before you begin to fix the trouble. We started by reconfiguring the BIOS to boot from a CD instead of the hard drive and loading XP’s recovery console.

Matt looked sheepish – fearful his pictures, video and documents were about to get trashed.

We lucked out. Matt’s problem was the same as most of the others I’d read about. It took a few hours, but slowly but surely, his computer fixed itself, rebuilding files and reconstructing the recalcitrant boot sector.

Why couldn’t the Dell tech fix this? No clue. They should be ashamed of themselves for the solution they recommended. That’s totally unacceptable.

Why doesn’t Windows XP do this on its own without demanding a disk most users don’t have? Again, no clue. Microsoft should be ashamed of that and for its often meaningless BSODs.

Bottom line – always have a geek at the ready… preferably two!

My Personal, Personal Video Recorder

Months ago, from the scraps of old computers, I pieced together a Personal Video Recorder or Disk Video Recorder or Digital Video Recorder – I never know which name is right. Take your pick.

That it ran at all was a surprise!

Over time I added extra hard drive space and a new CPU/motherboard combo. Anything that could fit in, and was heavily discounted, flew its way to my house. I was happy to take out a Phillips head screwdriver and do battle. I know my way around the inside of a computer case.

I chose KnoppMyth as my software. Hmmm…. this is going to get a little geeky, but I’ll give it a try.

MythTV is a software package to ‘make’ a DVR. It runs on Linux – the operating system that talks to the hardware in your computer. Linux is an operating system, like Windows XP is an operating system.

Linux is free and freely modifiable. And, it’s free as in, “Here it is.” It’s not free as in, “Here’s a copy of Windows XP I downloaded off the net, along with this serial number.”

So far, so good.

I say Linux, there is really no specific software called Linux.

There is Ubuntu Linux and Fedora Core Linux and Red Hat Linux, etc. Each is slightly different for slightly different reasons. Remember, it’s free. If you wanted to form a group with friends or with your evil twin to make a Linux distribution, more power to you. It’s allowable and encouraged.

KnoppMyth, the DVR software I used, combines a Linux ‘flavor’ (Knoppix Linux) with MythTV. It’s downloaded and then burned onto a disk. It’s the computer equivalent of making a Betty Crocker cake.

I like KnoppMyth, but it has its shortcomings. It isn’t 100% up-to-date and there are a few nagging bugs. Any time I’ve attempted to update or fix something, I’ve broken then entire installation.

Since KnoppMyth doesn’t seem to be a perfect answer, I decided to try to roll my own MythTV installation – combining MythTV with a Linux operating system. That’s how I wasted a good part of Sunday!

My attempt was to add MythTV to Ubuntu&#185 Linux. Makes your head spin? I should have said the same thing and stopped right there.

“How tough could it be,” I said to myself?

All day Helaine reminded me, “Messing with the penguin,” the penguin being our euphemism for Linux, “never ends up being a good experience.”

Before bedtime Sunday night, I had given up on mating Ubuntu and MythTV… but I hadn’t given up on the quest.

Today, while I was at work, my PC was downloading Fedora Core 5 – another Linux flavor. It was a 3+ Gb download! Now, home and in pajamas, I’ve burning it onto five CDs.

There’s a website which describes the process of mating Fedora with the very latest MythTV version. It looks easy, though it’s 29 printed pages (honest).

I could have gone back to KnoppMyth, but that was too easy. I want the feeling of accomplishment that is only earned following feelings of frustration and angst.

I’ll report back after the installation is finished, or the penguin and I have settled our score for good.

&#185 – Ubuntu seems to be the Linux distribution garnering the most favor right now. Forgetting MythTV for a second, Ubuntu was easily installed and came fully stocked with the programs most folks need on a daily basis.

As opposed to earlier Linux distributions, Ubuntu found and installed drivers for my sound and video cards without asking. It found its IP address for web surfing. It worked right out of the box.

I would recommend Ubuntu for any non-gamer who uses their computer for web surfing, IM chatting, word processing, email and other ‘normal’ web pursuits.

Right now at least, Ubuntu and the other Linux distributions are virtually virus and spyware free and they nearly never crash!

Blogger’s note: I worked on this project until 4:00 AM. Tuesday morning, I picked it up for a while, but it’s not done yet. Amazingly, after all my original downloading, most of the install time has been spent downloading newer files to replace the ones I got yesterday.

When I was providing input, it was copying intensely dense computer code from a web page to a ‘terminal’ window. I’d hit enter and the screen would look like hieroglyphs were flashing by until I had to ‘feed the beast’ again.

Hopefully I can complete the task later tonight.

My Biggest Computer Repair Secret

I have no virus protection on my PCs at home. Pretty scary huh?

Actually, no. I’ve had a few minor run-ins, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed pretty quickly. Not using Internet Explorer, instead browsing the web with Firefox gives me minor protection, but that’s not the real answer.

The fact that lots of my friends have been infected implies the problem is more than just being susceptible. There is a certain innocence in the operator that adds to the threat.

Every friend whose every been infected has had virus software on board! Every single one. Sometimes it wasn’t activated, but it was there.

As far as I’m concerned, anti-virus software is nearly worthless. Test after test shows most viruses are released into the wild before anti-virus software has been updated. AV software is most valuable after the fact, when you’re trying to disinfect.

When friends call, there is one thing I always suggest first: Restore. This might be the best feature in Windows XP, though it is little known outside the geek community.

Windows XP’s Restore function turns back the clock on your PC. Any mail, saved data files and downloads remain. Any programs installed or changes to the registry (Windows’ index) disappear, though the files that could reinfect you do remain lurking on the hard drive.

If you’ve installed something awful, most likely it will become inert!

Restore is found by clicking the Start button and then finding your way to Help. It’s hidden in plain sight. That last sentence comes from experience. Everyone’s first reaction is, “I don’t see it here.”

Oh, one more thing. After restoring is complete, I do suggest at least one ‘scouring’ by an anti-virus program to clean out the junk.

Right now (and this changes) my favorite is from AOL… really. AOL’s Active Virus Shield is a rebranded version of the top rated Kaspersky program, but it’s free.

I guess even AOL realizes less of this garbage is good for everyone and will save them money in the long run.