SameOldSchmidt

As I mentioned a little bit ago, I had a physical failure on my primary hard drive and had to re-install my operating system. I had a legitimate copy of Win XP that came with my PC but, of course, I never bothered to burn the restore CDs that they nag you about. So I didn’t have a copy of the OS to install. I downloaded an nLite’d version of XP and installed that on a spare 200 gig drive I had, making that my primary hard drive.

I don’t know if it was a vagrancy of the nLite-ified install of the OS or what, but my PC was just not the same. It was hella slow for no reason, like I’d open a browser and my mouse cursor would chug and stutter across the screen, like the PC couldn’t handle the task.

Granted, my PC isn’t some hot rod. I’m not playing Crysis on it. It’s an AMD64 CPU, 1.5 RAM, cheapish PCI (plain PCI, not PCI-E) GeForce FX 5500 with 256 RAM, 200GB IDE hard disk. A pretty average PC but plenty of power for the non-gaming stuff that I do. There’s no reason XP should chug and stutter.

So I was like, screw it, if I’m gonna reinstall the OS again, I may as well give Vista a try. The install was pretty painless and it saves all your existing crap in a folder called “Windows.old” so that’s handy. I’ve only had it on there for a couple days, only used it for a few hours but my sluggishness seems to have gone away - and that was my main gripe. I know it’s been out for a while but I personally have never touched Vista so I’ll have a learning curve.

Irritating problem right out of the gate: My Linksys WUSB54G wifi adapter was not Vista-compatible. If I had a later hardware revision of the same model number, it would have been supported. Oh well. So I went to Wal-Mart and dropped $40.00 on a newer Linksys PCI wifi card and I got Vista online with that pretty quickly. Optimally, if/when we move in the next month or so, I’d like to go back to running a cable between my PC and the router so it’s sort of wasteful to buy a wifi card that I may not need in the near future. But whatever, as I often say: If that’s the type of thing I’m worrying about, then my life must be pretty ok.

I picked up a 500GB external hard drive over the weekend so I can back up my stuff and be protected when the next crash goes down. Going through my digital junk, I found some old MGU mp3s. This one is going to be my new hard drive backing-up anthem.

My primary hard drive crashed yesterday. It happened while I was at work; my brother Nate got on my PC to check his e-mail and it just locked up on him. I trust that he didn’t pour Mountain Dew in it or anything, it was probably going to happen anyway and Nate was just the poor schmoe who was using the ‘puter when it died. No hard feelings, bro.

I installed an nLite‘d version of XP on a spare 200GB drive I had on-hand. So I’ve at least still got a computer but all my apps and data are gone. I’ve learned my lesson! I’m gonna go buy an external drive and start doing weekly back-ups.