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7736. alistairconnor - 6/11/2009 7:42:01 PM My faithful old HP laptop (must be going on 7 years old) has been blue-screening a lot with disk errors... Tried to clean up the disk and now I get the dreaded "Non-system disk or disk error"...
I haven't actually got time to deal with it, because I've got three hours and twenty minutes left to file my income tax on line... under pain of a 10% penalty. 7737. iiibbb - 6/12/2009 2:33:24 PM Message # 7721
Wabbit, since you regularly back up, you might want to make it part of your routine to preemptively mirror your profile files in a secondary account you've already set up. I had a friend who used to have profile crashes on his machine all the time and always had a second profile he could log into to "fix" things.
If it doesn't stop the crashes, it might as least spare you the hassle of putting the brakes on something you're in the middle of.
7738. iiibbb - 6/12/2009 2:38:07 PM Yesterday MS Excel just quit working on me. No reason at all, but when I try to start it, the installer wants the original disks. I got office pre-installed on this machine, so all I ever had was a recovery disk, and with the past 2 moves I don't really know where it is at the moment. I'm certain that it wasn't acceptable as a installation disk a while ago. So I'm going to have to re-install a pirate copy.
This quashes any guilt I ever had about pirating MS software. I'm pretty sure I've paid for office 2 or 3 times in my life now. There is no reason for software to just conk out, and if they're not going to provide a means to help their users, then screw them. 7739. wabbit - 6/12/2009 10:47:19 PM iiibbb,
I've always got a backup profile, but it is never a dupe of another. If something in the profile is causing a problem, having a mirror with a different name won't necessarily be any help. Replacing things like the Dreamweaver configuration files, or fonts, email programs, address books, etc. are easy enough to do, you just have to remember to back them up.
I don't worry much about losing something I'm working on, I figure if I did it once, I can do it again. It's time lost, but not the end of the world. I once had a computer hard drive die on me just as I was finishing up the bibliography for a paper that was due the next morning. Fifteen pages or so, all gone. The prof found me in the library typing furiously shortly before class and came over to say hello, and I gave him the two sentence explanation without even looking at him. He headed off to the class and amazingly enough, I actually got that sucker done and printed in time. Thank god for memory and index cards. And did I learn not to leave writing to the last minute? Well, sort of...
I'm still having computer problems, though not as bad. Windows boots up and quits after a minute or so. I shut down, log into safe mode w/ networking, check my email, then restart and log into Windows in normal mode. For whatever reason, that is working so far.
Are the other MS Office programs working for you? I've heard of problems with SP2. 7740. iiibbb - 6/13/2009 5:40:21 AM Everything else was working. My laptop is 5 or 6 yrs old. It was Office'93.
P's work had a disk... I reinstalled it, and it's working now. Might've been a sector going bad on the hard drive... I don't know.
If there's anything in this world that could turn me into a Luddite it's Microsoft's products. 7741. wabbit - 6/13/2009 1:45:04 PM It never ceases to amaze me how often Microsoft screws up their own software. 7742. wabbit - 7/10/2009 3:46:44 PM In the fwiw ymmv category - if anyone is thinking about Windows 7, let me say I've been running the beta with 1.5gb RAM and it runs fine. Not nearly the resource hog that Vista is, cleaner interface, faster, not as annoying - and half price for another day or so. 7743. alistairConnor - 7/10/2009 11:12:20 PM well, every second OS from MS is good. Or something. I was worried about buying a new laptop because of Vista, I think I'll hold out for W7 (or go with a Google netbook!) I honestly have never used a Vista machine (though I do run some Windows 2008 servers, which is the same guts without the annoying extra features). 7744. iiibbb - 7/14/2009 4:05:49 PM 
7745. wabbit - 7/15/2009 3:55:40 PM Sad, but true.
It reminds me of the game we played as kids, was it called Telephone? One person whispered something to someone, who repeated it to the next person, and so on until it reached the last person who said out loud what they heard - and it was never what the original speaker had said. 7746. alistairconnor - 8/18/2009 5:37:52 PM Climate nemesis?
Methane bubbling from the seabed off Norway
Scientists say they have evidence that the powerful greenhouse gas methane is escaping from the Arctic sea bed.
Researchers say this could be evidence of a predicted positive feedback effect of climate change.
As temperatures rise, the sea bed grows warmer and frozen water crystals in the sediment break down, allowing methane trapped inside them to escape.
Not to worry -- it's all perfectly natural.
It's even happened before; that time it killed thousands of species, and seems to have cleared the way for the emergence of the higher mammals. 7747. alistairconnor - 8/26/2009 11:57:25 AM I'm being a klutz with hardware.
The disk drive on my 2001 HP laptop has been getting hard errors for months, and instead of doing anything about it I waited till it wouldn't boot any more (probably aggravated by the summer heat).
I've bought a replacement, but haven't got a version of XP to install on it... being an OEM install, delivered without a Windows CD.
So, I've managed to resurrect the product key from the semi-dead hard drive (which, obviously, is different from the one on the sticker on the laptop itself!) and now I'm trying to reconstruct a bootable XP install CD to go with it (I've got the damaged disk in an external case, plugged into my computer at work).
Pretty routine really. Only two problems:
1) there is data I really want to get off the zombie disk, so I'm stressed about it
2) I don't actually enjoy this stuff.
(Yay! I managed to copy the I386 directory, after several tries.) 7748. iiibbb - 8/26/2009 1:49:22 PM So there's a procedure for creating a workable windows XP without an out of box CD? 7749. alistairConnor - 8/26/2009 10:10:40 PM Yes there is. I testify that it works.
The funniest part is, in my case it's absolutely legit. I own the licence, I didn't have the media.
It would have been smarter to do it while the old disk was still reliable of course. 7750. iiibbb - 8/27/2009 1:01:20 PM New news on bees and colony collapse
High fructose corn syrup.
My only question is that I thought Europe wasn't having as big of a problem with CCD... do they not feed their bees with HFCS? 7751. alistairconnor - 8/27/2009 5:02:42 PM HFCS is a very American thing. In Europe, domestically produced sugar is mainly from beets.
I have heard of beekeepers putting out buckets of sugared water to get hives through tough times, but not as a routine thing. 7752. robertjayb - 9/14/2009 7:51:40 PM Solar-powered cooling?
Warning: Breakthrough hinted. Be wary.
Someday, you might unplug your air conditioner and cool your house on a 110- degree afternoon by cranking up the heat from the sun.
In his laboratory at the University of California at Merced, physicist Roland Winston says he is nearing a breakthrough that could make that scenario happen in the next several years.
7753. alistairconnor - 10/27/2009 6:27:41 PM Write to your senators. Now.
When Barack Obama was elected president, he was heralded as a possible savior for climate- treaty talks that had dragged on for years while George W. Bush rejected limits on U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions.
“America is back” at the United Nations negotiating table, Democratic Senator John Kerry declared after the November election. Danish climate minister Connie Hedegaard said U.S. emissions policy moved forward 35 years overnight.
Instead, Obama may send empty-handed envoys in December to the table in Copenhagen where 192 countries will try to assign emissions reductions because Congress has given him no mandate. With the European Union, Japan and Australia ready to pledge cuts of more than 20 percent only if other nations follow suit, the stage is set for promises to collapse.
“How can we expect other major players to move their position until they know that in the end the U.S. is also going to deliver?” Hedegaard, chairwoman of the UN talks running from Dec. 7-18, said in an interview.
When Obama picks up his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in December, he’ll be an hour’s flight from where more than 10,000 envoys, UN officials and lobbyists will be meeting to conclude an agreement on slowing climate change, a challenge the president has said the U.S. will “lead the world” in tackling.
Obama hasn’t decided whether to make an appearance, administration officials said. Environmentalists say he’s a likely no-show because stalled climate bills in Congress mean the U.S. may have little to offer, threatening to unravel prospects for a global deal. 7754. wabbit - 10/28/2009 12:36:49 AM I have a question. What is stopping the EU, Japan and Australia from going ahead without the US? Are we financing it for everyone? Or are the EU, Japan and Australia looking for a fall guy so they don't have to move forward on their own?
Ok, that's three questions, but two are follow-ups. 7755. alistairConnor - 10/29/2009 1:20:01 AM The USA is only the second-biggest producer of greenhouse gases these days. Nevertheless it is still the world's biggest economy.
Everyone is eager to drag their feet, if others drag their feet. Concerned and his clan have always maintained that there is no point in the USA making unilateral concessions, because the Chinese will never make any. Well, guess what. The Chinese, the Indians, the Brazilians are now talking serious GHG reductions. There is a serious chance of serious progress, but it can still all turn to shit.
All of this could at least have been seriously started ten years ago, had the USA taken the lead, instead of actively sabotaging the process. Europe, in particular, has not waited, but has implemented GHG reductions. Now, the USA, or at least Obama, has started talking the talk. The US legislation, at least Waxman's original version, is a major improvement on the European model. But if it isn't passed, then Obama will probably not even go to Copenhagen, and US representatives will mouth platitudes and make no commitments. Remember, the US signed the Kyoto protocol and never ratified it. They won't do that again. They are hamstrung by Congress.
And, no exageration, the future of the world hangs on the actions of a Congress for whom the most ridiculous pork-barrel local measure will always be far more important than anything concerning the rest of the world.
There is a genuine longing for a resumption of positive American leadership in world affairs, after the recent ugly hiatus. If the US chooses to shirk this responsibility, well, the shit hits the fan.
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