So I started up the new netbook this morning on battery power at about 9:30AM just after I got to work. Our internet connection was down so I played on the laptop moving some files around, and let Windows install an update it has already downloaded. After that the laptop was in and out of standby several times throughout the rest of morning as I was in and out of my office. After lunch myself and two co-workers worked on a cost proposal and time line for a project we are proposing. We used my new laptop with it attached to the conference room projector (screen off just the external display). I moved the standby time out to 15 minutes and the laptop ran pretty much continuous from 1:00PM until about 5:20PM working on a Word and Excel document and occasionally looking up info on the web (internet was restored just before lunch). I turned it off for the trip home and then watch the parade for the county fair with GFWTR and Abby. Sat down a few minutes ago and send those documents to another coworker for review and started this post... I just looked and the battery is down to 27% left. Not bad for nearly a full day of use.

It appears that Mechwarrior 5 will be set early enough to be all inner sphere, no lousy clans. And it appears that at least some of the old classic chassis are back. I thought Battletech had lost the rights to the Warhammer mech (the mech who's perspective you are viewing from in the video.)

I haven't bought a new computer game in many years and the only new game I have played recently was Halo 2 my brother got me for Christmas. If this games becomes reality I will be spending money on it. No doubt with much consternation from GFWTR. The game, a new video card and a good joystick.

ETA: Apparently they will be giving away Mechwarrior 4 free as a way to generate interesting in the new game. BattleTech.com supposedly will have it for download "shortly".

So I have been fighting and ear infection since early December. I have been on a 5-day and 10-day antibiotic. This Friday it was back and I was back to the doctors for the third time. I am not on some really mean antibiotic that I will likely have to take for 15-30 days. I guess I have some really nasty infection and it's kicking my arse. Tried to go to sleep last night and tossed and turned from midnight till about 3:00AM. Advil bearly touched the pain. Laid there for another half an hour and finally gave up. The pain was mind numbing and I was definitely not going to get back to sleep. I surfed the web for a few minutes and then realize that I might a well go and install my Christmas present from my brother, Halo 2 for the PC. This is the first new game I have gotten for my home computer since... hmmm I don't remember.

I played for about 3 hours after getting it installed and updated. I just finish another two hour session after Abby went to sleep. So far I am having a lot of fun with it. I really enjoyed the first Halo and this story is just as good. The Flood does not freak you out quite the way it did with the way it was introduced in the first game. The vehicle battles are very cool and I love the way the vehicles take damage. I also like due weilding the weapons despite how much I generally hate duel wielding in movies. (If you have ever tried to duel wield a pair of handgun you'll realize why. Can't hit crap and you go through ammo twice as fast.) Over all it's been pretty good.

One thing the game does point out though is my new 2.33 Ghz Core 2 quad computer is nice but the 128MB ATI graphics card is definitely lacking. I had to turn down the detail and turn of the aliasing to make the game playable when the terrain is complex and/or a lot of bad guys are on the screen at the same time. Any suggestion for a good graphics card that can handle a game like Halo 2 without being supper expensive would be great. I would guess another ATI or Geforce card in the 1/2 GB variety is what I need but would love to hear specific suggestion from those a little more up to date on this type of thing.

So after buying the new Dell desktop machine for our primary computer my brother asked me for my old laptop (2Ghz Celeron) since his computer had just died. It really wasn't completely dead but the hard-drive was slowly eating itself and the place he took it told him it wasn't worth fixing. I told him to give it to me and and I would sell him mine real cheap. Well $35 dollar for a 60GB drive from comp geeks and I have his laptop up and running, at least all the hardware was. The nightmare of installing the OS than began.

The machine is a little dated, IBM Thinkpad, PIII, 900Mhz, 384MB RAM, but it was running XP Profession when I got it and I figured that would be what I would put back onto it. My brother did not have the XP disk but I was able to extract the CD-Key from the old hard-drive with a program I got of the web. I figured I could use that CD-key (I assumed was valid) and the XP Pro disk for my work machine and all would be good. No dice! I tried several XP disks from work (several different builds of SR1, and SR2) no luck. I even tried a few pirated CD-keys. These would let me finish the install of XP but of course since I couldn't authorize it. I tried several ways to get it to accept a change of the CD-key to my valid key or some other way of transfering the authorisation from the old drive to the new. Nothing worked,and since I could never authorize that copy of XP I would have been dead in the water 30 days later. I even went so far as to try an install of Win98SE since I had a valid CD-key (on the bottom of the laptop) and a Win98SE install disk. That worked, sort of, the OS installed and worked but little of the hardware worked correctly. The USB port didn't work, the display drivers would only do 640x480, 16 color, and it would not let me install the drivers for the wireless card despite having the Win98SE compatible drivers on the disk that came with the card. All in all I did four different attempts to install XP and one with 98.

Seeing my frustration a co-worker suggested giving Linux a try and I was so feed up with Windows by that point I figured what the heck I would give it try. My last attempt to run Linux was back when my primary machine was a Pentium 133Mhz and I was installing Linux on a 486. That ended poorly with Red-Hat either forgetting/corrupting the password to root or me forgeting it. I suspect the later.

This time I down loaded the latest version of Ubunto (Intrepid Ibex 8.10) and created a bootable install CD. The install went very well, first time. The only glitch was getting the wireless card working. It only took me about a half hour of digging on Ubunto's community website to find a nice walk-through that helped me figure out the exact chip-set in my US Robotics wireless card and then how to get the drivers installed correctly.

I still have a lot more to learn about Ubunto but so far it has made this old laptop a decent little machine. The Thinkpad is a lot smaller than my old Toshiba so for what I will use this machine for it will be good. I just have to find some replacement caps for the trackpoint. I really like trackpoint and this one works but I think one of my brother's kids ate the little red nub off the trackpoint.

So what is the angst with Vista? I hear it all the time and of course we all have seen the horrible Mojave commercials. So was is the source of this negativity with Vista? So far in my personal experience it has been very stable for me and I have not had any problems with software installs. So far I have install the following.

-Firefox 3.0
-Quicken 2007
-Software and Print drivers for my Canon MP600 all in one printer
-Software for editing video bundled with my Canon FS100 flash camcorder
-Office 2003 (Word, Excel, Power Point, Outlook)
-Window Mobile Device Center (syns my Mogul PDA/phone with Outlook)

I am guessing that most of the problems come from companies trying to get Vista machines to play nice with other XP and NT machines. Anyway so far the new computer is running great. It is amazing how much fast Word or Excel loads compared to my tired old laptop.

After about 5+ years of using the same old laptop (Celeron) we have finally broke down and bought a new desktop PC. This post is coming from that new PC. I am running Majave Vista and so far so good. I did have a little trouble finding the Vista drivers for my Canon all-in-one printer/scanner but did manage to get is working. So here is what I bought:

A Dell (My last desktop was a Dell too, a Pentium 133!)
2.33Ghz Intel Core 2 Quad
6GB of RAM (expandable to 16GB)
750GB (3/4 of a TB sound cooler)
256MB ATI Radeon video card.
Display: LG 22inch, 1680x1050(max), Flatron LCD

The only miss so far is the LG display only came with a 15-pin analog cable and no DVI cable. Both the video card and the display can use either but they cheaped out and only sent the analog cable. I will fix that on the way home from work. I did have purchase seperately and add a wireless network card but that install went pretty quick and painless. In the process I removed the modem. The fact that they are still putting modems in computers kills me. I thought I was a late comer to high speed internet. Can that many people still be using dial-up to make is worth adding modems?

I like laptop keyboards. At home I used a laptop for everything and at work I have a laptop keyboard plug into my workstation. So I was please that the keyboard that came with the dell was not what was on display. This key board is a hybrid; the keys are shorter in size and stroke than a traditional desktop keyboard but not as flat and short stroked as a laptop keyboard. I think I will get use to it quickly. It is a bit noisy but I guess I can live with that.

Now I just have to get Halo 2 install with out GFWTR noticing and I will be havin' fun, at least until she notices.

With the new version (2.0) of Firefox they added a close box to each open tab on the browser. I hate them! I end up closing tabs on accident when trying to switch tabs. The middle click close works fine that added close box on the tab is simply a land mine for me to click on. I have looked and not found it in the options but I would love to be able to get rid of those close boxes. Anyone know of a way to get rid of them without going back to pre 2.0 versions of Firefox?