Busy, Busy, Busy
My XP box died, so I bought a used Dell because I need to work on some legacy software.
I have been spending my time upgrading the drivers et al. so I can work on it. It won’t be on the ‘Net after it gets updated and Microsoft and Dell are the only sites I’m visiting so I will wait until my Eset software is up for renewal to put any virus software on it.I’m transferring things with a thumb drive and eset scans it whenever I plug it in, so there isn’t much chance of an infection.
I’m getting really sick of the XP start-up tune.
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So? Disable the start/shutdown sounds. 🙂 One of the first things I did when installing XP (I actually had a script that I ran after a reinstall to setup everything the way I liked it, including running a .reg file to disable all the garbage I never used, and tweak a bunch of settings that XP always had set low by default for pre-2004 h/w systems).
Feels kinda strange not having XP any more. But with all the new h/w, it simply would be stupid. No pint in having 16 GB RAM for eg, since XP can only use about 3.5 GB of it! And there are other issues also that require several kludge fixes. I still prefer actually using XP over Win 7, and most definitely over win 8x!! Still, I think I can dumb down the win 7 UI to be as *usable* (dumb) as XP could be made to be (ie. not get in my way trying to tell me what it thinks I want to do, and warning me constantly that I may be doing something that may just possibly not be what I wanted to do! Like installing some s/w that doesn’t come from M$!)
I won’t be tweaking anything on this box until after I get what I need to do done, to get the client off my back. He is on time constraints and I had to wait for the sucker to be shipped to me. Amazingly the biggest issues are with drivers, as XP had been updated this year.
The recovery CD is for Vista, so I’m hoping it hangs together long enough for me to finish what I need to do. It has a duo core Intel processor, 3G RAM, and a 160G SATA drive, so it will be useful after I no longer need it for XP.
I dumbed down my Win7 to be basically XP long ago. But one thing I didn’t dumb down was the sneak peak icon bar at the bottom, it actually works better than the old school window bar stuff. Hover over the Chrome icon for example and it shows me tiny pictures of the Chrome windows that I have open, and I choose which one I want. A lot better than a string of tiny little boxes with squished letters in them.
Windows 7 is the new Windows XP. I am *so* glad that I had the foresight to buy my HP laptop the month before Microsoft forced HP to sell Windows 8 on all their consumer laptops!
That’s true badtux. 🙂 I prefer the W7 taskbar, and being able to pin app’s etc is nicer than the XP style. I hate the w7 start menu though! But luckily, there are several free fixes for that! There are a number of things I prefer in W7 than XP, but W7 is a resource pig compared to XP! And it takes more work to get rid of all the crap M$ decided everyone really *needed*! Too bad the ‘XP Compatibility Mode’ (XP running on M$ crappy Virtual PC) doesn’t work much. Though, XP running on VMware Workstation seems to work fine – one of the reasons I got 16 GB RAM). When the next Gen5 CPU’s arrive (the REAL ones, not the Haswell *refresh* – ie. speed bump), I’ll replace the i5 I have with an i7 and get another 16 GB RAM. 🙂
Actually, a question badtux. 🙂 Is it better to run VMware on top of W7, or Linux? I would suspect Linux… but you have more experience than I do in that area. It also depends on which I use the most, and where I need the best performance I guess. And that would be W7. I have to run Adobe CS6 for eg, and it’s a real pig! 🙂
@ BRyan: Yeah, I understand. 🙂 A really quick tweak for some annoying things is this great tool I’ve been using for years! Works on everything from W2k toW7. 🙂
xp-AntiSpy 3.98
BTW, this is the *REAL* one (of course!) There are some fakes out there that will tell you after a scan you need to buy something to fix whatever BS is say’s you need to buy something for!
Yayyyy! LOL I just discovered I have my 100th ‘follower’ on Pinterest! LOL 😉 (that doesn’t include people who only follow one or more of my boards. It’s people who follow my whole site. Not bad for 2 months! Compared to Facebook, 17 in 2 years; Twitter, 27 in a year; and 2 (I think) on Google Plus! And I have other social media sites also. LOL I’ve also had over 1,000 *likes* for individual pins. I have just over 1.600 items pinned. So not bad there either.
It’s been an interesting social experiment the past year, and the results are somewhat surprising. I have 4 or 5 regulars who comment often, mostly from the USA (2 from Florida) (1 from Denmark) & all women of varying ages. One thing they all have in common, is they *say* they are INTJ or INFJ types (and from what I’ve seen of their boards, they do appear to fit the profile). 😉 🙂 I may end up having to move to Florida Bryan! LMAO (though, I would prefer Denmark). 😉 😀
It’s all grist for the mill of my soon to be updated business plan. 🙂 It’s been an interesting, and important, social exercise.
I had the MS Office shortcut bar on my old XP, but I’m not going to bother with loading Office on the new box, as I will be primarily working in DOS. It was similar to the Win7 bar, but without the preview.
Hopefully the will come to their senses at M$ with Win9, or Win7 will be around longer than XP.
I’ll give that software a try, Kryten. as the box keeps complaining that there is no antivirus software. I may breakdown and get another Eset license just to stop the nagging.
It’s a good tool. 🙂 Some tips to save you some time:
When you first start, it will ask you if you want to save the current profile. it’s a good idea too, then you can revert back with 1 click if something unexpected happens. 🙂 I keep the Profile to “Neutral” as that allows me to choose all the options I want enabled/disabled myself. Also, it’s worth changing the Mode to “Accessible” as you are not familiar with it yet. It simply adds whether each item is “Active” or “Inactive” to make it easier to tell what state each item is in. To see what all the color codes mean, click on the “?” and select “Symbol Reference…”. 🙂
you may as well disable “Automatic Updates” to stop the main nags. There are no more updates available anyway. 🙂
M$ are crazy. XP accounts for about 25% of all Win market share since 95, and apparently is still selling in some stores, even though support is gone. W7 is the next best seller, and sales have actually been increasing! LOL
XP could easily have been great as the early x64 builds showed. The XP x64 SP2 build was pretty stable and most annoying mem-leaks in the crappy XP code base were fixed. Some made it back into XP x32, but some didn’t. But M$ was determined to ram Vista down everyone’s throats. Thankfully, most sane people laughed at it and it got what it deserved! Embarrassing obscurity. 😀
One of the few Corporates I know of that wants to deliberately kill it’s cash cows to push their stupid ideology/philosophy! Are they a business or what? Morons.
There are several better alternatives to hugely bloated Office that are free if you need it Bryan. As I posted last year. 😉 If a company can produce an alternative to Word/Excel/Powerpoint for less than 50 MB, you have to ask why MSO is over 700 MB?!
Wohooo… I have a troll on pinterest! LOL Some US moron made a comment to a pin I have about McD workers in Denmark being paid US$21/hr and a Big Mac costs only .56c more. He made the typical inane wingnut comment, and I replied hard. He hasn’t replied yet… Hope I haven’t scared him off that easily! 🙁 How tedious. *sigh* They don’t make trolls like they used to. 😐
I run VirtualBox on Windows to run Linux on top of Windows. I use VirtualBox to run Linux, rather than VMware Player, because my testing shows that Linux runs better under VirtualBox than it does under VMware Player.
The reason I run native Windows is twofold:
1) Games. Games don’t run worth a flip in a virtual machine. I do occasionally like to play a game of Civilization or somethin’ like that. (Warning — don’t click on the link at work, loyal readers, though it is a hilarious depiction of US foreign policy at work 😉 ).
2) Driver support. Linux doesn’t support a lot of consumer hardware. Especially on laptops. Trying to run Linux natively on this laptop would be misery. It was only recently that Linux *finally* added the ability to use the ATI graphics chip on the motherboard, for example — it would only use the embedded Intel graphics before that, and the embedded Intel graphics on Ivy Bridge are misery. (Like most modern gaming laptops, this one has switchable graphics where the ATI is used only for 3D work and the 2D stuff goes thru the Intel graphics).
But that’s me, I have a big workstation-replacement laptop because it’s my everything as a workstation (I have a big rack-mount 12-drive RAID server to handle data, but it’s got fairly modest processors in it and I don’t want to disrupt my NAS and SAN services by using it as a workstation anyhow). If you’re a serious gamer my setup probably isn’t for you, or if you travel on planes or trains or public transit with your laptop, ditto.
The only thing I needed XP for was to access some old ESX 3.5 servers at work. I retired them in favor of some slightly-less-old ESXi 4.1 servers and some slightly newer RHEL6 KVM servers, so I no longer need XP, and am glad to be rid of it — its security is far inferior to Windows 7’s. It’s okay for embedded purposes, but it’s a menace if used as a workstation on the Internet.
I definitely agree you need really good AV software to use XP on the ‘Net for anything, even limiting it to software updates.
I’ve located a new compiler that is supposed to make the legacy stuff compatible with Win7, but I have to wait to implement it, because it alters the data files, making them unusable with the old software. The is the core business software for this client, so I have to proceed slowly.
“Alters the data files”…. oooh, yeah. That one makes me cringe alright. Sort of like how the XFS file system in the 3.x kernel used by Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 upgrades RHEL6 filesystems such that you can’t go back to RHEL6 if RHEL7 doesn’t work out for you. That really kills my usual migration strategy, which is to install the new OS on a different partition and roll back and retry later if the migration fails because of some failure in the upgrade process.
Too many developers have no operations experience, and haven’t a clue as to the repercussions of their decisions….
People with a ‘better idea’ don’t seem to ever envision that other people might not share their enthusiasm. I always include the ability to import and export data as old-fashioned comma delimited files in my programs to be used for last ditch back-ups. Everyone can use those to recreate their system. Unfortunately that is not an option you have based on your application.
Reconstructing file servers with 24 terabytes of storage from their mirror file server is an exercise that is best left to theory. Even with 10 gigabit Ethernet, we are talking about a significant amount of time during which the company is basically dead in the water.
Out in the cloud I’m migrating from Postgres 9.2 to Postgres 9.3 to get the foreign table reference ability in Postgres 9.3. Unfortunately I cannot simply upgrade the software and have it upgrade in place (I do have snapshots of both the VM’s and the data block devices). It has to be a full dump/restore process. Which is a four-hour process right now with the amount of data we have, and it will become even more arduous as time goes on….
I have always been amazed how the coders working on data base software have so little awareness of how large they become over the years. I remember during the 1980s talking to Ashton-Tate about the limitations in dBASE and they couldn’t understand why anyone wanted a million records in a single file. Even explaining that it was a customer data base for a utility company didn’t sink in.
You are dealing with logarithmically more data, and they still don’t get it. The speed of light is starting to be a real limiting factor and nanoseconds are important with the volumes of data you work with. In a 24/7/365 environment upgrades are a major challenge.
I won’t be running games on this box (except maybe ‘spider two suits’ (a patience type card game) while I’m waiting for something to finish, or I just need some down time. 🙂 On the big WC rig, I have plenty of high-end games, but no time. *shrug* I am considering getting the new ‘Wolfenstein – The New Order’ (I loved the first one when it came out all those years ago! Very dated now, but the bees knees back then!) LOL It seems it’s about 44 GB! So would most def be the biggest game I own, if I get it.!
I was working with dBase II for a finance company, and I had a lot of trouble with a large test db I created. I knew dB III was rumored, and contacted AT also about getting a beta. They couldn’t understand why Getty Finance need such a big db! They were truly a strange company! Not surprising about dB II though. It was based on Vulcan, a personal db created to handle football pools. LOL No wonder Borland got them for a song (and there is a complex tale there!) Anyway, stopped being my problem. I joined the Military. LOL Before I left Getty to sign up, I told them to look at either R:BASE as it looked very promising, it could handle large databases, and was significantly faster than dBase or DataEase (same reasons). 🙂
The gfx companies I design workstations & render farms for can’t afford to loose any data, or to take even an hour for recovery. It’s why all the data is at least dual redundant in dual locations, with a high-speed tape backup system. The one I did in 2011 has just had a major update to the storage/backup systems. They upgraded they two tape backup systems to Tandberg Data StorageLibrary T160+. It stores 377 TB (uncompressed) & has 16 LTO6 HH drives, and 16 FC ports. In tests they could get a sustained backup rate of around 5 GB/s, in a 16U rack. 2 backup sets are taken away in an armored truck to two secure data storage sites every 12 hours. The system has 16 tape magazines, and the s/w allows them to create complex scenario’s. A single magazine stores the tapes for the 12-hour *snapshot* (for up to 4 jobs they are working on and is barcoded by the system), which is removed and replaced with a tray full of blank tapes. Takes about a minute. They spent a fortune on a very high-speed fault-tolerant network infrastructure. One day down for them, could cost them a $million! So, it was cheap insurance in the end. 🙂 The T160’s will be paid for on the next movie they do the animation or CGI for! LOL
Their data storage is handled by 2 HDS Unified Storage VM systems, with a mix of SSD & the new 6 TB drives.
Tandberg are the standard for fault tolerant systems at banks, which is where I ran into them. I was doing some maintenance work on the interface between some check validating terminals and the main system. What looked like an interesting job turned out to be a couple of miswired cables. In the old days of RS-232 terminals having a break-out box solved a lost of problems.
The problem with A-T was their refusal to increase the size of their internal record number. That was the real limiting factor before you hit the limits of MS-DOS. They just couldn’t imagine the types of things people wanted to do with their software.
Tandberg’s tape library business is, of course, the former Exabyte. Exabyte was one of those companies that had so much potential but decided they were going to make a consumer play with their VXA tape system. Unfortunately VXA couldn’t scale as hard drive sizes scaled, and they lost a small fortune on it (Exabyte never had a large fortune to lose), and ended up going out of business and being acquired by Tandberg. The tape libraries are still designed by the former Exabyte team in Colorado.
I liked Tandberg’s tape drives back in the day, they had excellent documentation and were reliable as bricks. I still have a bunch of Tandberg documentation on the top shelf of the book-case in the music room. Too bad they went bankrupt back in 2009, but the new company seems to be doing okay, so …
Regarding operations, how can we do a four hour database server upgrade process without taking the web site down? Well, the web site itself becomes read-only for four hours. The incoming stream data is collected in a queue while the operation is taking place. If the operation is successful, the switch is flipped to switch the web site to the new database, and the backlog is applied to the new database server. If the operation failed for whatever reason, the backlog is applied to the old database server and we schedule a new service window next week.
To say that this is annoying is an understatement…
Yeah, I was somewhat surprised when the Tandberg filed for bankruptcy in 09 (it was actually the holding company for Tandberg Data ASA and Tandberg Storage ASA, but same thing in the end). A new holding company quickly acquired the majority of the Tandberg business units (Cyrus Capital which is also a major investor in Overland Storage (previously Overland Data)). They have recently created a merger between the two companies with Overland *buying* $42m of Tandberg with Overland stock. (A curious deal – see below). 😉
Luckily, I keep track of all this *stuff*, so when the gfx company contacted me earlier this year about upgrading the systems, I said I was concerned about staying with Tandberg for obvious reasons! So they delayed the u/g for a few months and investigated the options. Thankfully they are a large enough company (financially) that other companies take then seriously, especially as they have the weight of major Hollywood etc companies behind them! It helps with these kinds of negotiations, especially when looking for 5 yr strategies and the company they deal with knows they can and will be held accountable for any discrepancies in *promises*. 🙂 We were shown the strategic road map (set in concrete) for the Tandberg StorageLibrary products, and they plan to continue the LTO development for another 2 generations (LTO 6 is the new gen, with 7 & 8 planned and in development). They are also working on a pretty exciting replacement strategy when LTO reaches EOL. 🙂 So, with some stringent guarantees (including with Cyrus), they signed a 5 yr deal with Tandberg. They did a similar thing with HDS. Though WD have a notorious *don’t give a f*ck* attitude to clients wants & needs, thankfully HDS has remained somewhat autonomous! 😉
The whole Tandberg *bankruptcy* thing was something of a sham actually. Overland had wanted to enter a merger deal with Tandberg, but since they were legally a Dutch company, the Dutch regulators said no. Tandberg took out a large loan with Cyrus (who normally don’t do these kinds of deals, they are primarily a distressed debt fund manager worth about $4 bln). When Tandberg defaulted on the loan (to nobody’s surprise), they were acquired by Cyrus, who then went ahead with the deal with Overland. 🙂 Considering that no changes have been made, especially to the Tandberg management team that apparently caused Tandberg get into a position that necessitated filing for bankruptcy, it’s curious. LOL
Oh well… such is business! There is always a way to get what you want, if you have the means and the money! 😀
Batch processing never dies, it just isn’t talked about.
Nice solution, Badtux, and certainly better than a four hour maintenance page on your website.
Companies always seem to have ways of doing what they want, no matter what the regulators say. They take a hit on their good will account and reputation, but can gain it back if they continue to make quality products and support them.
HDS is still owned by the Japanese. The only thing that got sold to WD was the hard drive business.
I almost ended up as an HDS employee when they wanted to acquire one of my old employers, but Federal regulators put a kibosh to it because one of our clients was the NSA, even though none of our systems were used for top secret work — they were used to monitor security cameras around the installation. I guess the notion was that if we were owned by HDS, HDS could monitor the security cameras and see things they weren’t supposed to see and pass it on to their Japanese overlords. Except, uhm, neither the security cameras nor the recorder systems were connected to the Internet, meaning someone would have to be on site to see anything through the cameras (and someone being on site was very rare because it took a long time to get clearance), and our people on the few occasions they did make it on site always had a butterbar looking over their shoulder ready to put the kibosh on anything unseemly. So instead that employer went out of business and now that installation has completely unmaintained security camera systems. Yay regulators, making things worse for national security. Sigh.
Anyhow, HDS makes some top quality gear. That’s their biggest problem — their bottom end gear is so expensive that they can’t sell into many markets. That was one reason they wanted to buy that former employer, which sold bottom end gear but never succeeded moving upmarket. Still, if I had the bucks, I’d buy HDS gear…