Sunday, February 17, 2008
The last week has been rather difficult.My computer died... not sure if it was a hardware issue, a virus, or just generally corrupted system files, but whatever the case, it was mostly non-functional.
Anyone who knows me will know just how much time I spend on my pc, and so will understand just how distressing this was.
So... I bought a nice big 750gig external hard drive, and with the computer in safe mode, backed up all of my doccuments and transferable software.
Next I disconnected all non-vital hardware, ie card readers, webcam and gfx cards, and did a full reinstall of windows.
This worked just fine, right up to the point that I tried to re-fit my gfx cards. I have 2... one rather better than the other, but neither would install for reasons that fail me.
What this meant was that while I could have a perfectly functional workhorse of a computer, games were now out of the question.
Oh well.
On the upside though, now that everything was backed up, and my OS installation was fairly minimal, I could take the risk of repartitioning the hard drive, and setting the whole thing up as a dual-boot system.
So now I have a nice clean installation of Windows XP on one partition, and a very funky, not to mention quirky, copy of Ubuntu Linux on the other.
I'm finding this Linux malarky quite fascinating, having never used it before.
It seems to me that modern Linux OS's have something of a split personality.
On the one hand, they can be quite intuitive and very clever, allowing you to automatically install software from a huge list of compatible programs, without even having to launch a browser to find it.
On the other hand, installing things like drivers, which don't appear to be installed automatically, is like going back in time, to at least MSDOS era computing.
Very very odd.
This external hard drive thing is a cool piece of kit.
I'd been planning to buy one some time soon anyway, so the pc failure just prompted me to get the thing a little sooner.
The thing is... it can be accessed by my PS3.
Why does this matter?
Because the PS3 can play mp4 and DIVX video.
So think about it.... PS3 plugged into a 32 inch TV, with a massive hard drive containging my entire DVD (and later, VHS) collection.
No more searching for the right disk or tape... it'll be all right there, available at the touch of a button, not to mention being viewable all round the house (and garden) from my PSP, via wifi streaming.
And there's more....
For Valentines day, Andrea and I bought each other presents.
I gave her a Swarovsky crystal bracelet, which she seems very pleased with.
What she gave me pleased me no end.
It's a watch, but not just any old watch. This watch is also an mp3 player, and better yet... a video player.
It comes with software to convert your typical digital video file into 128x128 SMV video files. These are fairly tiny... 35meg, compared to a 150meg avi, and with the screen being so tiny, you don't notice the lack of quality.
So, I can fit my entire collection of Invader Zim videos into it's 2gig storage capacity, still have room for a load of tunes, and have the whole lot strapped to my wrist wherever I go.
Yay!
Labels: computers, consoles, gadgets, video
Steve 8:11 PM [+]
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