gottahavacuppamocha

Yesterday when I got home from work my PC wouldn’t start. Kind of strange having it happen so recently after my monitor dying. The gremlins must be getting into my gear. Chances are that the only problem with the PC is the power supply. However, the PC is many years old running a 700 MHz AMD Duron (kinda equivalent to a Celeron), so I’ve been thinking about replacing it anyway. With the raise from work as a full time LSP, it crossed my mind a bit.

I did get the laptop from work, and I do bring it home every night, but I prefer Linux for my home computing, whereas for work I more-or-less need Windows so I can do remote assistance/remote desktop stuff. I’m typing this on my own laptop, BTW.

I have a brand new monitor and hard drives from my PC, so now I need to get a new motherboard, CPU, RAM, and a power supply, then I’ll be good. I’ll probably go for a new case, too. I could probably buy all of this stuff at once, but it will probably be better to buy it over the course of the next month. I can use the laptops for school and work. A new case with power supply will be $50 – $100, RAM will probably be another $100. Motherboard and CPU will likely be $250 – $500 depending on what I get.

Toying around with Vista on the laptop, I’m kind of impressed by it. It’s a lot – prettier – than XP. I thought about putting it on my PC at home, then I remembered Vista isn’t that good. While it might look nice, I can’t make it my own. I can’t change the background on the login screen. There is a program out there that claims to be able to do that, but it costs about $40, while in Linux I can do it for free. With Linux, if I want to use a different window manager, such as Fluxbox, or KDE, or Gnome, I can. I can change them pretty easily without having to worry about them loading spyware on my computer. I had a bad time loading Firefox on a PC today – it kept auto-installing Google Toolbar, which I hate. I ended up installing Opera on that machine. Luckily, I don’t have to use that PC.

One strange thing that happened today, walking near on of the hospitals on campus and found a Palm Pilot with a hard case. I picked it up figuring I would check it out when I got home, figure out who the owner was, then call them and return it. I got home and started it up, but there was no info on it. No names or addresses. No contacts. No memos. No tasks. There was some software on it that leads me to believe it belongs to a medical student – test prep stuff. Strangely, I’ve also found two cell phones over the past few months. One of them didn’t have a battery. The other one did, but it was dead. I tossed those. I might keep the Palm, or maybe I’ll find out if the School of Medicine has a lost-and-found.

At work I am a full-time LSP (Local Support Provider a/k/a computer guy). I was able to justify to the powers-that-be that it would beneficial for me to have a laptop. It came in today. The idea was to kill two birds with one stone.

The main reason for a laptop is that it would be beneficial for me to have ready access to “my own computer” like the one I use in my office. However we have multiple sites in different buildings, so it isn’t really possible for me to drag around a desktop PC. Yet I still need access to stuff I have setup on the PC in my office. The laptop is supposed to replace the desktop PC for pretty much all the computing stuff I do.

The other reason was I needed to get a computer that would run Windows Vista. The PC’s in my office are older. They’re P-4′s and still plugging away on XP. However, the faculty buy their own computers and since I will be expected to support Vista at some point, I figured if I got a laptop with Vista on it, the department would probably save some money in the long run.

The laptop is a Dell Latitude D630 with an Intel Centrino Duo processor and 2 GB of RAM. Since it just came in today, I am still playing with it. I’m blogging this from the laptop, but I’m using Firefox, which was one of my first downloads of the day. I also downloaded antivirus, and Office 2007. Aside from checking my email in Outlook, I haven’t messed with it yet. At the moment I’m downloading some language packs. I thought the best way to get used to using Office was to actually use it. Since I’m taking French this semester, the French multilingual pack seemed like a good idea. Now I can do my homework in Office as well. I may still install OpenOffice though.

As I’m prone to do, I decided to give myself a project this weekend. It involves the Lingo/Giraf thing I was working on months ago. My coding skills aren’t quite that good, so I figured I would see if MediaWiki 1.10.1 could be adapted for use in that project. It looks like it works okay on my PC, but with the site on the PC, I can’t check it with the Palm T|X.

Long story short, I upgraded the whole website to PHP 5. As suspected, it broke some things, namely WordPress. I upgraded WordPress to 2.2.2 to see if that helped, and it didn’t really. What I had to do was remove the SpamKarma2 plugin along with the wp-contact-form. The contact form isn’t a big loss. SpamKarma2 was a mixed bag. Ever since installing it, I would get all kinds of fatal errors relating to memory (e.g. tried to allocate …). Plus, I found myself logging in less often because I knew SK2 would take care of the spam. I got lazy.

Anyway, WordPress seems to be back to normal more-or-less, minus a couple of plugins. I’ll probably have to sort out problems as they occur.