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miko2Damn The Dummies, Full Speed Ahead!
Everything is bleak
It's the middle of the night
You're all alone
And the dummies might be right
You feel like a jerk
My music at work, my music at work...
So in this case the dummy was the so-called expert on the MSI boards who half-read my description of my problem and fired off a three sentence solution: Reformat my hard drive, reinstall Win XP, and I won't have such a mess. He explained how this would work even if I only had the upgrade version of Win XP, and this was a clue that he hadn't even bothered to read the full paragraph that I'd written, because I'd clearly explained that I had the full version of Win XP Pro, the one that says on the box "for Win 95 or earlier, or for PC computers without Windows". So basically the guy stopped at the point where I said I'd installed as an upgrade to Win 98se, and he didn't want to hear any more than that until I "fixed" that problem.
Mind you, everything on my computer is working fine, I just don't have sound. I only want someone to tell me how to find the drivers that will fix this problem. (We won't go into the computer acrobatics it took to fix Norton Antivirus after my upgrade... I had to download a special program just to delete my Win 98 version, and do a bunch of other stuff before I was finally allowed to install it again for Win XP).
So there's a guy on the City of Heroes boards who has been a lot more helpful, and he points me to the exact nforce drivers that I need. And I download them. And they unpack, and it tells me it's setting up an Install shield to guide me through the process.
And then it vanishes and nothing more happens. This behavior repeats itself several times, and I realize that something is more than a little wrong. Or, as the Tragically Hip would say, the dummy is probably right. I mean, he is the know-it-all helpful expert who hangs out on the MSI boards answering people's questions. I don't even know if he's an employee or just a generic volunteer know-it-all, but he knows more than me. And even I know that an upgrade install is bound to be buggy compared to a clean install from scratch.
This is why I avoided installing Win XP for nearly two months in the first place. Because I knew it would be a hassle. When I got this computer a year ago, I installed Win 98 and a few days later realized that I should have installed Win 98se, but by that point the program would not upgrade from one to the other, and I had to reformat and reinstall. And I screwed that part up and later Jeff had to come over and use Partion Magic to help me reformat my hard drive properly.
So. I'm not really looking forward to doing this, but once I've backed up all of the files and programs that I want to keep (pretty easy actually, I don't keep that much on my C drive and this computer has very few things that I've added, just a few games and utilities)... after I do all that, what is the best way to reformat my hard drive? Last time I went into dos and typed some command that formatted only a small portion of the 40 gig drive... so clearly I didn't know what I was doing, and still don't.
I know you don't like mirrors when they reflect on you
I've been listening to the mix cd that I made last week every time I'm in the car. Some of those songs have been stuck in my head for days, such as I Am The Highway by Audioslave, Music At Work by the Tragically Hip, Elevation by U2, Fell In Love With A Girl by the White Stripes, Dumb Love by Stone Temple Pilots, and Let Me Sleep Next To The Mirror by Idlewild...
You woke up first this morning
You told me that you had
A bad dream, like one never before
What was in it? My reflection,
So that I'm far too critical.
Let me sleep next to the mirror,
Don't tell me that you don't like mirrors,
Don't tell me that you don't like
Looking right through your own reflection...
Idlewild's songs make about as much sense as the Tragically Hip's do. But I really need a new mix cd to listen to. ^_^
And I had that Music At Work stuck in my head all morning, since the opening lines seemed to describe my frustration with working on my computer last night so well. Of course, other lines in the song make no sense whatsoever... which is very typical of the Tragically Hip. For example, what does it mean when they sing "When the sunlight hits the olive oil don't hesitate"?
But then I had a shipment today, and the description went, "Palmolive & Sunlight & Surf & Facial Tissue..." So maybe the song is describing a situation where boxes of household cleaning products shift while in transit, and Sunlight cleaner "hits" Palmolive oil? ^_^
Or maybe not.
Next Thursday, which is a good Friday,
there will be a mother's meeting for fathers only
I got a phone call Sunday afternoon. I was a bit distracted because I was in the middle of killing a large group of level 52 hydras with seven other heroes... but I left my friends hanging to answer the phone. It was Mike, who was offering to come over to help clean. We figured maybe Wednesday or Thursday, and I said I could get up as early as 10 am but he should call me before he comes over, or warn me when he's coming. In any case I was sort of waiting to hear from him and when I didn't, I assumed that he wasn't coming over yet.
So I stayed up past 4 am and then slept in past noon. Or I tried to... the doorbell rang and woke me up around noon. I thought it might be UPS or something since I have more than one item that I've ordered online before Christmas which I'm still waiting for... but in fact it was Kristin and Charles, who said that Mike had told them that they were supposed to show up at my place to help clean.
Well anyway, that didn't happen, I was really feeling tired even though I'd had at least seven hours of sleep... and unfortunately I didn't get any more sleep than that. Also apparently Mike had called earlier to say he wasn't coming over because he was sick. So he's going to try and come over tomorrow (later today) I guess... not sure how this will work as a great deal of the mess in the livingroom/dining room is still Tom's junk that I don't know where else it can go.
So where do I go to buy a virtual fur suit?
Having installed Win XP, even though I don't have any sound, I went ahead and signed up for a game I've been interested in for a while that only runs on Win XP (or on MacIntosh's current OS actually). It's called Second Life, and it's similar to There or Sims Online in that there's no real "game", just a huge graphic muck environment. As far as I can tell it's much better than those other two games however, but I've still run into bugs. The biggest one is just that the game is very slow to animate or "flesh out" what's in front of you, so that I often run into trees or houses before I can see them, or things look really blurry and then slowly come into focus. I sort of assume that I could add more memory to my computer and maybe solve some of that... I mean, a faster processor would help too but mine's not that slow and I don't have plans to upgrade any time soon, but I only have 512 ddr in there because Win 98 wouldn't take more than that. Now, I can add more memory, and I might do that very very soon.
It was interesting though, I ran into some furries in the game. By which I mean, they had furry animal-morp avatars. Very cool looking. I have yet to decide how much I might enjoy a game which is basically the prettiest, most interactive chat room on the net, but we'll see. I have a seven-day free trial, and afer that it's $9.95 a month and I can afford to do that for a few months to see how much I like it.
Everything is bleak
It's the middle of the night
You're all alone
And the dummies might be right
You feel like a jerk
My music at work, my music at work...
So in this case the dummy was the so-called expert on the MSI boards who half-read my description of my problem and fired off a three sentence solution: Reformat my hard drive, reinstall Win XP, and I won't have such a mess. He explained how this would work even if I only had the upgrade version of Win XP, and this was a clue that he hadn't even bothered to read the full paragraph that I'd written, because I'd clearly explained that I had the full version of Win XP Pro, the one that says on the box "for Win 95 or earlier, or for PC computers without Windows". So basically the guy stopped at the point where I said I'd installed as an upgrade to Win 98se, and he didn't want to hear any more than that until I "fixed" that problem.
Mind you, everything on my computer is working fine, I just don't have sound. I only want someone to tell me how to find the drivers that will fix this problem. (We won't go into the computer acrobatics it took to fix Norton Antivirus after my upgrade... I had to download a special program just to delete my Win 98 version, and do a bunch of other stuff before I was finally allowed to install it again for Win XP).
So there's a guy on the City of Heroes boards who has been a lot more helpful, and he points me to the exact nforce drivers that I need. And I download them. And they unpack, and it tells me it's setting up an Install shield to guide me through the process.
And then it vanishes and nothing more happens. This behavior repeats itself several times, and I realize that something is more than a little wrong. Or, as the Tragically Hip would say, the dummy is probably right. I mean, he is the know-it-all helpful expert who hangs out on the MSI boards answering people's questions. I don't even know if he's an employee or just a generic volunteer know-it-all, but he knows more than me. And even I know that an upgrade install is bound to be buggy compared to a clean install from scratch.
This is why I avoided installing Win XP for nearly two months in the first place. Because I knew it would be a hassle. When I got this computer a year ago, I installed Win 98 and a few days later realized that I should have installed Win 98se, but by that point the program would not upgrade from one to the other, and I had to reformat and reinstall. And I screwed that part up and later Jeff had to come over and use Partion Magic to help me reformat my hard drive properly.
So. I'm not really looking forward to doing this, but once I've backed up all of the files and programs that I want to keep (pretty easy actually, I don't keep that much on my C drive and this computer has very few things that I've added, just a few games and utilities)... after I do all that, what is the best way to reformat my hard drive? Last time I went into dos and typed some command that formatted only a small portion of the 40 gig drive... so clearly I didn't know what I was doing, and still don't.
I know you don't like mirrors when they reflect on you
I've been listening to the mix cd that I made last week every time I'm in the car. Some of those songs have been stuck in my head for days, such as I Am The Highway by Audioslave, Music At Work by the Tragically Hip, Elevation by U2, Fell In Love With A Girl by the White Stripes, Dumb Love by Stone Temple Pilots, and Let Me Sleep Next To The Mirror by Idlewild...
You woke up first this morning
You told me that you had
A bad dream, like one never before
What was in it? My reflection,
So that I'm far too critical.
Let me sleep next to the mirror,
Don't tell me that you don't like mirrors,
Don't tell me that you don't like
Looking right through your own reflection...
Idlewild's songs make about as much sense as the Tragically Hip's do. But I really need a new mix cd to listen to. ^_^
And I had that Music At Work stuck in my head all morning, since the opening lines seemed to describe my frustration with working on my computer last night so well. Of course, other lines in the song make no sense whatsoever... which is very typical of the Tragically Hip. For example, what does it mean when they sing "When the sunlight hits the olive oil don't hesitate"?
But then I had a shipment today, and the description went, "Palmolive & Sunlight & Surf & Facial Tissue..." So maybe the song is describing a situation where boxes of household cleaning products shift while in transit, and Sunlight cleaner "hits" Palmolive oil? ^_^
Or maybe not.
Next Thursday, which is a good Friday,
there will be a mother's meeting for fathers only
I got a phone call Sunday afternoon. I was a bit distracted because I was in the middle of killing a large group of level 52 hydras with seven other heroes... but I left my friends hanging to answer the phone. It was Mike, who was offering to come over to help clean. We figured maybe Wednesday or Thursday, and I said I could get up as early as 10 am but he should call me before he comes over, or warn me when he's coming. In any case I was sort of waiting to hear from him and when I didn't, I assumed that he wasn't coming over yet.
So I stayed up past 4 am and then slept in past noon. Or I tried to... the doorbell rang and woke me up around noon. I thought it might be UPS or something since I have more than one item that I've ordered online before Christmas which I'm still waiting for... but in fact it was Kristin and Charles, who said that Mike had told them that they were supposed to show up at my place to help clean.
Well anyway, that didn't happen, I was really feeling tired even though I'd had at least seven hours of sleep... and unfortunately I didn't get any more sleep than that. Also apparently Mike had called earlier to say he wasn't coming over because he was sick. So he's going to try and come over tomorrow (later today) I guess... not sure how this will work as a great deal of the mess in the livingroom/dining room is still Tom's junk that I don't know where else it can go.
So where do I go to buy a virtual fur suit?
Having installed Win XP, even though I don't have any sound, I went ahead and signed up for a game I've been interested in for a while that only runs on Win XP (or on MacIntosh's current OS actually). It's called Second Life, and it's similar to There or Sims Online in that there's no real "game", just a huge graphic muck environment. As far as I can tell it's much better than those other two games however, but I've still run into bugs. The biggest one is just that the game is very slow to animate or "flesh out" what's in front of you, so that I often run into trees or houses before I can see them, or things look really blurry and then slowly come into focus. I sort of assume that I could add more memory to my computer and maybe solve some of that... I mean, a faster processor would help too but mine's not that slow and I don't have plans to upgrade any time soon, but I only have 512 ddr in there because Win 98 wouldn't take more than that. Now, I can add more memory, and I might do that very very soon.
It was interesting though, I ran into some furries in the game. By which I mean, they had furry animal-morp avatars. Very cool looking. I have yet to decide how much I might enjoy a game which is basically the prettiest, most interactive chat room on the net, but we'll see. I have a seven-day free trial, and afer that it's $9.95 a month and I can afford to do that for a few months to see how much I like it.
