WonderCon

Mark Evanier has posted the list of panels he’ll be hosting at WonderCon. Looks like some good stuff, including a spotlight on Gene Colan, one of my favorite artists.

The main WonderCon site has an updated program schedule posted. They’ve got a Pixar panel on Saturday that I’m definitely interested in, with Brad Bird and Patton Oswalt.

I’m a bit worried about what the weather might do to my flight out of Newark, but it’s looking like the snow and rain will likely clear up by Thursday.

desktop Vista upgrade?

Just for yuks, I re-ran the Vista Upgrade Advisor on my desktop machine. It seems that a few of the issues that were present the last time I ran it have been straightened out. And those that the advisor still listed are probably correctable. There are drivers for my scanner and audio card now. And there are new versions of Nero and Retrospect, which are really the only incompatible software packages on my system.

This leaves me in the frightening position of being able to upgrade this box to Vista, if I really want to. I wasn’t planning on upgrading this thing to Vista any time soon, but now I’m tempted. Especially since I just did a full backup. I really think I need to resist the urge for another few months though. I’ve got the new laptop to use to learn Vista, and there’s really no reason I need it on the desktop. I can wait for other people to work through some more of the oddball problems out there.

almost done

Well, the sun is setting, and the backup of my main desktop machine is done, with no errors. I’m creating a disaster recovery ISO through Retrospect right now. Basically, Retrospect has a process that reads your Windows install CD and creates a new CD image that re-installs Windows and restores your backup. I’ve had to use this once before (on my machine at work, after a hard drive crash) and it works pretty well.

The one weird thing that gave me trouble today is that Retrospect was having trouble reading my Windows CD. After going through a number of things to figure out why that might be, I wound up just copying the CD to my hard drive first, then letting Retrospect read from the hard drive. My best guess as to why Retrospect can’t read from the CD drive would be that it’s loading some special drivers to make backups go faster, and that’s screwing up the regular CD drivers.

I’ve also finished setting up the old Gateway laptop. I reinstalled Windows XP, loaded all the Gateway drivers and software, upgraded to SP2, installed 73 patches, then went back and installed IE 7 and WMP 11. It’s in a pretty good state right now, though I don’t have any anti-virus software on there. There’s a trial version of Norton Anti-Virus 2003 on one of the Gateway CDs, but I don’t think I want to install that. Maybe I’ll install the 90-day trial version of OneCare, or maybe the free Avast or AVG. Or maybe I’ll let the next guy worry about that.

lots of computers

Right now, I’m running a full backup of my desktop PC to my new 500 GB external drive. I’m also working on wiping my old Gateway and reinstalling Windows XP on it, so I can hand it off to a friend who has some use for it. And I’m also installing various things on my new Vista laptop. So I’m jumping around from machine to machine, checking on stuff, pressing “OK” a lot, and stuff like that.

On the Vista laptop, I’ve spent several hours trying to get Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server Express set up. Everything seems to be working now, but it sure takes a long time to get that all set up. First, you have to install the original VS 2005 package from DVD. That takes a while. Then, you have to install SP 1. That can take quite a while: several hours. There’s a good explanation for this lengthy install here, and apparently Vista adds even more of a complication to this, so it takes even longer under Vista vs. XP.

After SP1, you need to install the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista Beta. I’m a little alarmed that this is still a beta; you’d think that one of Microsoft’s first priorities would be getting a good solid development environment running on Vista.

And, if you want to bring SQL Express up to date, you need to install SQL 2005 Service Pack 2. I’m not 100% if I had to do both of these, but I installed “SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced Services” and “SQL Server 2005 Express Edition Toolkit”. Then, I went back and installed the latest Books Online files.

So, all that took about four hours. Call me crazy, but that really seems like too long just to set up your development environment. Back in the old days, it’d take maybe 5 minutes to install, say, Clipper 5.2 or Turbo Pascal. I guess this is progress, but it doesn’t feel like it!

progress

I hooked up my new 500 GB external drive to my desktop computer today, so I’ll be ready to try a full backup tomorrow. I’m probably going to take my old 100 GB drive and use it to do full backups on the new Vista laptop and my old iBook. I’m not sure if I really want to keep that drive though; I don’t really have any place to keep it. (I’m just running out of room in my apartment!)

I also figured out that the DVDs I used to backup my Vista laptop at work yesterday were probably DVD+R (rather than DVD-R), which may explain why they worked while my DVD-R media wouldn’t. Maybe the drive just doesn’t work well with DVD-R? I’ve seen reference to the idea that DVD+R is more reliable, but that was on Wikipedia, so who knows it that’s accurate.

If I can manage to get my full backup(s) done tomorrow, then I can finally get around to installing Office 2007 on both my desktop and laptop. Maybe I can get some of the other installs I need to do on the laptop done too. Of course, I’d really like to get out of the apartment for a little while this weekend!

Vista backup

I tried the Windows Complete PC Backup again from work today, and it worked fine! The only difference is that I used DVDs from work instead of the ones I have at home. So, it’s looking like this was just a media issue. Weird. The DVDs I’m using at home are name-brand DVD-Rs that are supposed to be fine up to 16x. (The burner in my laptop is 8x.) The DVDs in work are no-name DVDs, and I’m not even sure if they’re DVD-R or DVD+R. Well, either way, I now have a complete hard drive backup (hopefully).

Meanwhile, I just installed LoJack for Laptops, which was included as part of the service bundle I got from Dell. I have no idea if I’ll ever need it, nor do I know if it’ll do any good if the laptop *is* stolen. Seems like an interesting idea, though.

And I signed up for some stuff at LearnDell.com that was also included with my service bundle. I don’t know yet if Dell’s online training is any good, but maybe I’ll try to work my way through some of it and find out if it’s worth it.

Windows Vista backup

My new Dell Inspiron laptop with Vista showed up at work yesterday. I haven’t gotten a chance to do much with it, since I was really tired yesterday and went to bed at 9:30. I did, however, complete some of the usual “new computer” chores: uninstalling some of the pointless crapware that’s loaded on the machine, applying various updates, and so on. I’ve now got the machine in a state where I’d like to make myself an image of the drive, so I’ll have a relatively clean image to fall back on if need be.

I’m trying out Windows Complete PC Backup. This should work pretty much the same way Ghost or Acronis work, and create a complete image backup of the machine. Alas, every time I try this (backing up to DVD), I get an I/O error on the first disc. I’ve run across some advice on the internet to kill any system restore points, then try it again. I guess I’ll give that a try. I called Dell support on this, just to see if they knew anything. After an hour-long call, all they could really do is advise that I keep an eye on Windows Updates and hope that this is a problem that Microsoft will fix. Not really useful advice, huh?

I’m a little bit paranoid that some of the Sonic/Roxio stuff that Dell preinstalls is messing up the DVD drive, but I don’t know enough to really have a clue if that’s the case. I guess I’ll play around with it some more, and see if I can figure it out. The only problem here is that I burn a coaster every time a backup fails. While DVD-R prices have fallen a lot, I still don’t like tossing them in the trash.

memories

I’ve been shredding old credit card receipts and stuff like that tonight. While I wait for my overheated shredder to cool down a bit, I thought I’d write up a blog post with some of the stuff I found.

Interesting things found in 10+ years worth of credit card receipts:
– I shop at Best Buy and Borders a lot!
– I paid $259 for a Microsoft Office upgrade back in 1993. (That’s a little more than what I just paid for the Office 2007 upgrade.)
– Gas used to cost $1.39 a gallon!
– My Kenwood receiver is ten years old.
– I paid $94 for a 14.4 bps modem at the Egghead in Green Brook in March 1995.
– I paid $50 for a copy of OS/2 in 1994. Purchased at the Short Hills Mall, no less.

Memories brought back by looking through old receipts:
– Dinner at Next Door Nobu with Paul and Rob a few years back.
– Disneyland after Ankur’s wedding.
– Hitting Epcot and Pleasure Island with Rob during a Great Plains conference in Orlando.
– Many large hotel bills from San Diego!
– A hotel bill from a Best Western in Troy NY from 1995. I’m pretty sure this is from when I took my brother Patrick up to RPI for student orientation.
– I found a bunch of bills from San Francisco, May 1995, iincluding one from Lefty O’Doul’s. These are probably from the trip I went on with my Mom and Dad to go see my brother Mike graduate from law school. I think that was the last time we ever took a vacation together.
– I moved into my current apartment on 3/19/94. I had to put down a $200 deposit on the truck we rented to get me from Rahway to Somerville.