The week began with my internet connection failing on an important call, and with me, not even as Administrator, being able to enable or disable the connections. I knew about this problem but had ignored it since my internet connection has been running solidly despite a few quirks.
This turned out to be a very deep error that could only be fixed by reinstalling Windows XP. Because I have an IBM Thinkpad T43, I did not get rescue disks with it, and had to burn 5 CDs. I also backed up my data to a USB drive. Reinstallation took many hours. But in the end, I gained many benefits:
1. Upgraded the hard drive. I purchased a 7200rpm 60G drive long ago for a different laptop and never got around to installing it. It is now installed in my Thinkpad, and it really is notacably faster. (One quirk is that on reboot I get a BIOS Error 2010 that tells me the harddrive firmware isn't compatible. So far I've ignored this error without issue.)
2. Discovered that Open Office is quite usable and on-par with MS Office. MS Office Basic was NOT installed by the rescue disks. At first I was angry because IBM's "Rescue and Recovery" utility states that "this will return your PC to the state it was in when it arrived from the factory". Not so! Because I was in a hurry, I installed Open Office 2.0 which is quite nice. It has improved tremendously from the last time I checked it out. (I also phoned IBM to get MS Office and they sent me a disk overnight - I still need this for Outlook).
3. Discovered that Mozilla Thunderbird is also quite usable. I needed an email thick client to interact comfortably with some mailing lists. This is another product that I've looked at in the past, and which has gotten much better.
4. Enjoying a game-free system. Counter-Strike:Source (CSS - a Half-Life 2 first-person shooter) has taken up a lot of my time for a few months now. I really like the teamwork and the thrill - didn't like the amount of time it was sucking from my life and the violence.
5. Enjoying stable, up-to-date editions of my favorite development software. (Sun Java SE 5, Eclipse 3.1, TextPad 4.0)
6. Enjoying connecting to the internet at coffee houses! Turns out that connection ownership issue was preventing Windows from renewing DHCP information.
7. Discovered the Google Desktop. Because I wanted to install so much of the software in Google Pack (which is a convenient single download that includes FireFox, AdAware, Adobe Reader, Picasa), I installed the whole thing. Turns out Google Desktop is a jaw-droppingly neat environment that programmers can use to enhance Windows with downloadable plugins. It is also responsible for keeping your software up-to-date. The Screensaver (which puts up photos) is nice, too.
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