Sunday, February 07, 2010
BolloxSo I've been rather frustrated by the inability of my video editing software to render out in widescreen. That's what you get for being a cheapskate and using freebie crippleware, but anyway...
So I'd seen this youtube video by NixiePixel, who demonstrated a very nice looking piece of free video editing software called Kdenlive, which runs on linux.
Now I'm no linux expert, but I've messed about with Ubuntu on a 2nd partition of my main computer, from time to time, so I figured it'd be worth looking into.
So, there've been a couple of dead computers sitting around the house for quite a long time, and I decided it'd be worth trying to take the good bits from each and cobble together one half decent workaday linux machine, to run this editing software. This would be really handy, as rendering final videos takes up all my main machine's cpu time for an hour at a time, leaving me unable to do anything else useful with the thing.
Anyway... I couldn't get the recent Ubunto release to burn properly to a disk, so I went out and got a magazine with Mint 8 (a Ubunti derivative) on the cover, and promptly installed that.
It worked, and the editing software appears to work too... though I do need to learn how to use it, as it's rather different from what I'm used to.
Now, the thing is, I liked Mint 8 so much, I figured I'd use it to replace the old installation of Ubuntu on my main machine. So I promptly installed it, whereupon it warned me that my hard drive was failing and I should back up and replace the thing as soon as possible.
"Yeah right! This thing's just fine." I said to myself.
Bad move.
So I carried on working with the thing, using both Linux and Windoze... and guess what?
Catastrophic hard drive failure.
I lost both Windoze and Mint 8. On booting, it gets to the start of the OS selection screen and then goes "Duh?"
I suppose I could repartition and reformat the thing, but since the warning told me the drive had actual hardware faults on the disk, as opposed to merely corrupted data, whatever I do with the thing, the end result will always be a bodge at best.
It's broken.
Bugger.
Andrea being the wonderful wife that she is promptly went online and ordered me a new drive, so I will be able to get things sorted. Also, I do have almost all of my doccuments, photos, videos etc backed up on an external drive, so pretty much nothing important is lost.
What it amounts to then is a very annoying inconvenience. I have to reinstall XP from scratch, then update it... update it some more... then some more... and then when that's finally done, I have to go find all the software I'd been using, and all the passwords I have stashed away on random pages of my black book.
So... say a week for the drive to arrive, and probably another week to get the whole thing back in a useful configuration.
I can't really complain though... for someone who loves modern technology, that PC is shockingly old. 7 years... give or take. Not only does that make it quite ancient, it also shows how much bullshit the PC manufacturers feed people, telling them how much they need the latest kit.
The only thing it's not really adequate for is gaming... and I have a PS3 for that. Everything else... right up to video editing...7 year old tech is just fine, thank you very much.
Shame about the hard drive though.
Labels: computers
Steve 6:42 PM [+]
Comments:
It takes a lot before I do a clean install and as well as completing all the updates I have to take off all the shit I don't want.
However, it does feel clean again as I download, try for 5minutes, don't like and delete a lot of stuff. I'm looking into building an xbox into a server so I can store away from the laptop and clean installs will always be easier.
Post a Comment
However, it does feel clean again as I download, try for 5minutes, don't like and delete a lot of stuff. I'm looking into building an xbox into a server so I can store away from the laptop and clean installs will always be easier.
The Benway Empire |
 |