Month: February 2007

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.

complications

Everything’s complicated. I wanted to do a complete hard drive backup on my desktop PC before upgrading to Office 2007. I’ve got a 250 GB hard drive in that machine, and I’m using about 200 GB on it. I’ve got an extra internal 100 GB HD, and an external 120 GB HD, so I should be able to get the backup done across those two devices without too much grief. But no. I burned up a bunch of time yesterday getting about halfway through the backup, then watching it blow up when it ran out of room on the internal drive. I’ve done this backup before with Retrospect, but it just isn’t working now. After tweaking a few things, I think I’ve got it right, and I start another backup. I’m puttering around doing other stuff in the apartment while this is going on; at some point, I decide to turn on the TV and check the weather. Boom. Turning on the TV causes a momentary surge (or sag, or something) that causes the computer to reboot. End of backup.

I’ve got a new UPS on order that should prevent this sort of power thing from happening again. And I picked up a 500 GB external drive at Best Buy today that should allow me to get the whole backup on one drive. (Then, I can maybe use the secondary internal drive for automated backups of key files. Wouldn’t that be nice?)

Amazon history

I read a post on someone’s blog today that made me a bit curious. He mentioned that some other bloggers had been posting their first Amazon.com purchase. I decided to go back and check mine. It was on June 26, 1997, and I ordered two books: Mort, by Terry Pratchett, and the Sybase DBA Companion. Mort was a great, and very funny, novel. It was out of print at the time, and didn’t actually ship until May 17, 1998. At that time, Amazon had a service where you could order a book, and whenever a used copy became available, it would be shipped to you. I’m not sure if they do that anymore. So many people are selling used books through Amazon now, that it’d be pretty odd to find something that you couldn’t get from a secondary seller right away.

The other book I ordered, the Sybase DBA Companion, was pretty useful at the time, since I was just getting started on Sybase. I’ve since moved to Microsoft SQL Server, but a lot of the skills I developed working on Sybase are still useful, since Microsoft’s product was kind of a spin-off from Sybase, though it’s diverged a lot over the last ten years.

My second order with Amazon was on August 15, 1997, and was for a book called Programming for the Newton Using Windows . That sure brings back some memories! I don’t think I ever got around to writing anything more that a couple of trivial programs for the Newton, but it was fun to play around with Newton programming for a while. I’ve since given away my first Newton, and sold my second. I’m using a Palm PDA now, the i705. I still haven’t gotten around to giving it up in favor of a smartphone or anything like that. Maybe I’ll get an iPhone, and then I’ll have come full circle, in a way, back to an Apple PDA of sorts.

Microsoft Office 2007

I just picked up an upgrade copy of Microsoft Office 2007 Professional from Costco. I also picked up a copy of the Home and Student version. That may seem kind of weird, but Office Professional doesn’t include OneNote, while the Home and Student version does. Costco doesn’t carry the standalone version of OneNote, and it didn’t seem like the H&S box would cost all that much more than OneNote anyway. Now that I’m looking into it a bit more, I see that Amazon has OneNote Home and Student 2007 for $54. I should probably look into returning the Office H&S version, or maybe selling it or giving it to someone at work.

The previous version of MS Office Pro allowed you to install it on both a desktop and laptop, and it looks like that’s OK with the new version too. You can pull up all of Microsoft’s license agreements here. The Office Pro agreement has this wording in it:

INSTALLATION AND USE RIGHTS. Before you use the software under a license, you must assign that license to one device. That device is the “licensed device.” A hardware partition or blade is considered to be a separate device.
a. Licensed Device. You may install and use one copy of the software on the licensed device.
b. Portable Device. You may install another copy on a portable device for use by the single primary user of the licensed device.

So that’s pretty straightforward. The H&S version is a little different:

You may install one copy of the software on three licensed devices in your household for use by people who reside there. The software is not licensed for use in any commercial, non-profit, or revenue-generating business activities.

Kind of interesting. I really wish they would just include OneNote with the Professional version, though. That would have made things a bit easier.

On another topic, Microsoft has come up with the weirdest possible retail packaging for Office 2007. It comes in a hard plastic case that’s rounded at the upper right corner, and hinged at the lower right corner. The inner section basically pivots out on that hinge. The CDs are stuck on a hub on the outside of this inner section, and the manual is inside it. (The H&S version doesn’t come with a real manual, by the way, while the Pro version includes a “getting started” guide that’s a little under 200 pages.) The product key is printed on a sticker that’s affixed to the back side of the inner section. The end result of all this is that you’ve got a plastic box that you can’t collapse, nor can you easily toss it out without losing your product key. If you want to get rid of the box, you need to find a separate CD jewel case to keep the CDs in, and you need to either photocopy or carefully peel off the product key sticker. I guess Microsoft does this kind of thing to make the retail box stand out on the shelf, but it’s really just a big waste of plastic. Oh well.

I’m not sure if there are any good books out for Office 2007 yet. There’s a free e-book that you can download from Microsoft at their Office 2007 Learning Portal. It looks there are links to some other useful stuff at that page too.

Pocket PC – DST changes

After going through a lot of grief at work, making sure all our systems would deal with the DST change OK, it just occured to me to check and see if my old Toshiba Pocket PC would change on the appropriate date. It took a bit of searching, but I finally found this page, which would seem to indicate that the Pocket PC will take the settings from my desktop PC when I sync. If that’s correct, then cool. (You also have to manually switch to a different time zone, then back to your own, to force the device to load the new settings. Weird, but OK.)

In poking around, I also found that there’s a new version of ActiveSync (4.5) out. I installed it, and it seems to work OK. Not spectacularly different from the old version that I was using (3.5).

There’s some more info on the DST fix here and here.

new Vista laptop

I just ordered myself a new Dell Inspiron E1505. I got a pretty good deal on it through Dell’s EPP (employee purchase program) site. (I have access to that through work, since we do a lot of business with Dell.) I got it with Vista Ultimate installed. I still can’t say that I’m really enthusiastic about Vista, but I do think that I’ll need to learn it, just for the sake of keeping my skills current, if for no other reason.

I need to pick up a book on Vista too, either Brian Livingston’s Vista Secrets or David Pogue’s Missing Manual, I think. I probably still have Livingston’s original Windows Secrets, for Windows 3.1, floating around here somewhere; I remember that being a really good book. And I have a couple of Pogue’s Mac OS X Missing Manual books, and those are pretty good too.

I should try and get myself a copy of Office 2007 too, so I can learn that. I might pick up the upgrade package from CostCo, or wherever else I can find it discounted to a semi-reasonable level.

Really, Microsoft is just getting out of hand with pricing. They do have the “Home and Student” version of Office now, and that’s relatively affordable, but it doesn’t include Access or Outlook, so that’s a bit of a deal breaker for me, at least. And Vista pricing is a joke, if you’re buying it off the shelf.

Meanwhile, I’m still getting over my cold. I feel a lot better today, but I’m still feeling a bit weird. As long as I’m back to normal by WonderCon, I’m good.