New Computer Stand

We went to Ikea yesterday and picked up a few things. One of them was this computer desk so that I could hang out in the living room with my wife while she watches TV. I can geek it out on the laptop and still be a part of the family.

Until now, I've been in the next room using a couch because it had a flat arm and that worked out nicely as a mouse pad. This table is small enough to fit in between the arms of the comfy rocker that I use in the living room, yet big enough for my HP DV9000 laptop to sit on and leaves enough room for my mouse.

New Domain Name

I purchased http://www.standardextract.com and set it up for my blog. I guess that I just wanted to do that because I'm a geek and I can.

I really don't get much traffic right now and I don't update it like I should. Every day I run into a lot of things that I tell myself that I'm going to blog about later but later never comes and my list of blogging points is endless.

HP DC7700 Reboot Problem Resolved

I've been battling an issue with these HP DC7700 workstations that we've decided to standardize upon for all future purchases. They're great machines but one problem has shown up and it's been fun to figure out.

When you boot up the computer, it gets to the Windows XP ctrl+alt+del screen and everything looks fine until you move your USB mouse in any direction or click it. The computer instantly reboots and brings you back to the same spot.

If I unplugged the mouse and waited for me to log into the workstation before plugging it back in, the mouse would operate correctly and the system would not reboot. This obviously wouldn't be a good fix for our users so I dove into the drivers and software to see what could be causing this.

It happened right out of the box on all three of them that we purchased so it had to be something that shipped with the HP. I thought that it turned out to be an Intel management tool that was preinstalled on these workstations. I uninstalled it and the problem went away.

The fix only lasted one reboot and it was back. This time, I visited Microsoft's website and installed the latest Intellimouse software. This time, the problem is resolved for good.

Building a foundation

This an exciting time in my life. I've done this twice already but every time is like new and equally amazing.

This is the time when I get to play a very large part of shaping the future personality of a new human being. Some child psychologists are split about this but only the ones who have not raised children themselves can possibly dispute that the first couple of years of your baby's life plays more of a role in their future personality and perceived intelligence than all of the rest of the years of their life.

These are the years when we are creating our childs foundation. Their little chemical factory in their new brains are being developed and fine tuned; and everything around them plays a large role in what neural connections are made strong and which ones are starved. The things that you do with your baby at this stage can have an enormous impact on their personalities even when they are 30 or 40 years old.

I use the analogy of the foundation on your house. If you build a house with a flaw in the foundation, to doesn't matter how well the house above that foundation is built ... it will be weakened and will likely not survive as well as a neighboring house with a solid foundation. Twenty years into the life of the house, the owner may not understand why they have to keep compensating for things that their neighbors do not. It is no mystery to someone who understands the importance of the foundation, however.

With your child, you can never go back and remake the foundation. It is there for the rest of the baby's life. That is why this stage of parenting is so scary as well as exciting.

Staying with Vista

Ok, so now I'm staying with Vista and just reinstalling. As I was getting ready to go back to XP, it hit me that this install of Vista was done as an upgrade from my existing XP Media Center Edition.

It jumped out at me as I started looking through the programs for what I wanted to save. I stumbled upon all of the HP crap that they love to cram into the little corners of your hard drive for whatever diabolical reasons they have.

I believe that almost all of the problems that I was having in Vista are a direct result of things not upgrading properly when I ran the upgrade install months ago. Outlook was crapping out on me, Windows Search wasn't working right, some other software wouldn't run for unknown reasons, and all sorts of crap.

After discovering this, I decided to break out the Vista DVD and do a complete reinstall of Ultimate clean and see what happens before regressing back to the XP days. I really do love Vista and despite the extra steps to get some legacy apps working, it is otherwise a much more secure and stable platform than XP was.

Since the reinstall, everything that was not working before is now working beautifully and I couldn't be happier.

Sorry about the false alarm.

Goin' Back to XP

Ok, so I think that I'm going to go back to Windows XP. I've given Vista my best and it's jsut not up to par, yet. I'm not one of those Microsoft hating people. I'm also no dummy when it comes to Microsoft operating systems. If you ask anyone who has worked with me, they will attest that I have this uncanny understanding of operating systems that almost seems as if I was the one who wrote the thing. Microsoft has done me in with Vista, though.



I'm going to miss Vista. It has a bunch of cool new features that I'll have to supplement XP with third party tools to achieve. I will definitely miss the UAC and the Aero desktop.



There are just too many things that I rely upon that are not working in Vista. Perhaps they will make it more stable in the next release or so, but they don't show promising signs of that. They are, in fact, promising to make it worse by strictly enforcing the session 0 isolation for services and preventing unsigned drivers from being installed in future releases (already being done in existing 64 bit releases).



Maybe I'll stick it out with XP for another year or so and wait for Ubuntu to mature a bit more. I will still be running Vista on a couple of computers but my main laptop just needs a less restricted operating system.

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