Securitron Doom/Linux Blog.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Windows Woes
I have tried to fix a Windows XP laptop recently, a machine runningWindows XP Home. The installation had corrupted and I tried to get the recovery
console to work but it would not work at all, it would lock up every time I
tried to use it and I had to use the recovery CD’s to re-install the
operating system. And I loaded up a Windows XP Professional system today and it
had locked up and I pressed the power switch in and held it for a minute to
reset the machine and it would not respond at all and I had to pull out the
power cord and hold it for a couple of minutes and push it back in to reset the
machine. I thought that Microsoft could do better than this by now. I mean their
OS needs to be reloaded every so often because of all the crap that accumulates
from the Internet and other sources. And software that is installed and
un-installed and not totally removed. I am sick of people coming to my door all
the time because they cannot get something working like software playing up and
Windows not working properly. It is really annoying when Microsoft cannot make
something like their own operating system work properly.
You would think with all of the money that Microsoft make they can afford to
hire good programmers to create a real OS, but Suse Linux 10.0 works better than
Windows XP and it does not need about 300 patches installed to guard against
Spy-ware and ad-ware installations. And Spybot came up with a dialog box about
some registry key had changed but the buttons where obscured by a grey bar of
something that was covering the buttons, but I could not close it by pressing
either button. and I could not get rid of it and I had to stop the resident
Spybot scanner to get rid of it. A very bad example of programming practice
indeed, I think that it might have quite a bad bug included. In the program
there are undoubtedly many bugs and it mars such an otherwise excellent and
useful application. Linux has a couple of virus scanners and a spam filtering
program but we do not need heaps of anti-virus and anti Spy-ware solutions. We
are protected by the permissions set on the file-system where the root user is
the only one that can change files and settings on the system
directories. Windows XP will let you change anything and not just files but
system settings and registry values whenever you want. It is a total joke I say,
I cannot believe people still run this operating system, riddled with bugs and
holes and prone to locking up and freezing and getting Spy-ware infections and
viruses and ad-ware and Trojans and that is just the start. But people will
always run this wont they? It is not like they have any choice in
the matter, Linux is not in the majority of the computer user base is it?
But I will keep using Linux and have a superior operating system and software
such as the Gimp, Mozilla Firefox and Emacs. Uemacs is also very good, a very
fast and stable editor. But so is the Main Emacs editor, very fast and
customizable and comes with some good extensions and can use the iSpell program
to check the spelling of your document such as blog posts. And it loads faster
than Open-Office.org 2.0, which takes about as long to load as Frodo and Sam
took to get to Mount Doom. But it is the best Office suite there is that is
free. And I am using it at the moment, with the Java Runtime as well. And it is
quite slow but usable. I have upgraded to Kernel 2.6.15 and I had little
trouble getting it to work either. I just had to start the Alsa service and
Esound because they were not running automatically. But it detected all of my
hardware and runs very fast as well. Using applications such as Alsaconf to
setup the sound hardware is faster than with 2.6.14, but Open Office.org is
still very slow indeed. But it is good to be able to load a new Kernel and have
some more features to use. I can still plug in my USB drives and have them
automatically detected and setup by the kernel. No problems there, I cannot get
my parallel port ZIP drive to work, so I might buy a external USB HDD of about
80G or more and use that to backup my files and store my burgeoning music
collection. It is about 497 Megabytes by now.
Linux WitchKing 2.6.15-Hell_Knight #1 PREEMPT Wed Apr 5 16:31:42 EST 2006 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux.
The above is the output from uname -a. I have quite a new kernel now even though
I did not get the 2.6.16 Kernel release. I know that exists but I still have a
good release. And I have enabled the extensions to the Reiser FS file-system and
the Fuse file-system. Now my machine is purring along nicely. If only the
Windows XP professional machine I spoke about at the top of this post would work
properly. Windows XP professional is a total heap of bull crap and Windows Vista
will be no different. An OS designed for the lowest common denominator with
large pretty widgets designed to please the eye of the n0ob and make it easy on
the eye and make it easy to use. Just like that software they bundle for digital
cameras that has over sized buttons and pretty widget designs to make it easy to
use, but is slow in operation.
--System name - Linux
--Nodename - WitchKing
--Release - 2.6.15-Hell_Knight
--Version - #1 PREEMPT Wed Apr 5 16:31:42 EST 2006
--Machine - i686
The above output is from my System Information program using the _syscall1()
function in C. Very fast too. The binary is only 11k when built with gcc
v4.02. See info(2) for more information.
My Website has been redesigned with a Perl CGI script handling redirections so
that I can have a menu with a drop down list box of options for browsing my
site. And it makes the menu.htm easier to edit. And I have fixed bugs in my
Linux and CGI code pages relating to the PRE and XMP tags I was using. Now they
will display all content correctly. And that is important for my visitors to
have more of a chance of reading the pages correctly. And that makes the
difference does it not? And my blog page is now working properly and has the
traditional table at the right with links to all of the blog archives. Although
I am using a DIV layer instead. I just have to update my blog archives correctly
to have the same template across all of my blog archive pages. I am going
through all of my pages and tweaking the look and fixing any bugs in the pages
and I am making great progress on making the pages easier to read. The
hyper-links have underlines now so it is more clear that they are hyper-links.
I am tweaking Open-Office.org with the Options dialog to increase performance
and I have found that switching off the Java support gives a good performance
increase. And go to the memory section and halve all of the values therein and
that will also help. OpenOffice.org is a good application, it just needs a speed
boost.
Went out Abseiling today. It was a bitterly cold day and there was quite a cold
wind blowing, but I managed it. It is quite a lot of fun too. And the view was
quite astounding too, we were about 500m above the surrounding countryside and
such had awesome views. But it is getting incredibly cold outside now and better
to stay inside. Just finished configuring my .emacs file and now it shows the
date and time in the modeline status bar at the bottom of the buffer. And it
updates every second. view my .emacs file here
this file it will make emacs much more fun to use and make your use of this
editor more productive. And it loads faster than OpenOffice.org which is
incredibly sluggish even with preloading. compared to Microsoft Word which loads
in a couple of seconds. And that is on a relatively slow Pentium 4 machine too,
with 512MB of Random Access Memory and running Windows 2000. But that machine runs OpenOffice.org very well indeed.
¶ 4/12/2006 01:14:00 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
