I did some more research and got the MacBook Pro happy living on the Windows workgroup. Of course, TopDawg (a Windows7 machine) isn't even completely happy living on a mere 'workgroup' with the other Windows machines. In fact, it's apparently the most finicky machine on my network now. Everything else seems happy to be there - even the MBP - but oh well. I can finally dump some tunes from my stash onto the MBP so I can travel with it next month and not be completely devoid of music. I usually have some tunes playing via WinAmp while I'm surfing or checking e-mail... mostly just because I can.

The MBP can see everything on BigDawg and can 'see' TopDawg,' but can't get in. TopDawg can do whatever it needs to do wherever, and so can BigDawg for the most part. So dumping or grabbing files from the Windows environment is no biggie... just like getting into BigDawg from the MBP... but TopDawg from there not so much.

Oh well - it's working well enough... for now.

A few months ago, I picked up an HP Color LaserJet CP1518ni and hooked it up to BigDawg, my Windows XP box that's been a trooper for several years. The printer's happy and works like a champ.

Then, I ran into some issues trying to get TopDawg (running Windows7 RC) to print. After some research, I followed some directions that had me crackin' a couple of Registry settings and everything was finally working - a Windows7 (RC) box printing across the network to a Color LaserJet mounted to an XP box and shared out to the network. Good stuff... just like it's supposed to (albeit with some Registry hacks that people shouldn't have to do).

As I mentioned in February, Microsoft decides they will turn-off support for Windows7 RC in March - no biggie... I'll just run without support. Wrong, what Mr. Gates meant to say was, "No more support for Windows7 RC... and it won't work anymore either without nagging the crap out of you every two hours to send me your money." Oh... well... since you put it THAT way... Bleh.

Yeah... I caved and bought Windows7 Ultimate for TopDawg. What can I say, I like Windows7 so far, and couldn't see going back to XP full-time. So you'd think it would be a matter of just dropping the Windows7 DVD in and let it install all the new stuff onto the hard drive and no worries about losing anything. Wrong. It demanded a complete reload and wiped everything out (OK... well, it renamed all of the important stuff into something that was a PITA to find).

After getting Windows7 running like it's supposed to (which is pretty nice, BTW), I found the need to print something. No problem - I'll just download the latest Windows7 drivers from HP and install them. Silly me - there are still no Windows7 drivers for this printer. Huh?! OK - well, I should be able to use standard drivers since the printer's installed on an XP machine, right? Nope - Win7 won't even recognize the fact that there's even a printer shared out there on the network. What?! Seriously?! Crap!

So I lived with just saving my print stuff to a share on the BigDawg and printed from there... but that's kind of a hassle, so I decided to give this whole thing another shot today. After several attempts at re-downloading the same stuff I already had, re-installing those drivers again, and checking all of the sharing parameters for the network, I went online and did some more research into installing and printing across the network. Turns out, that Windows7 STILL does not really work and play well with others (no doubt, Microsoft's attempt to herd the sheeple away from anything XP or older).

Not having any part of that (and not wanting to buy another $300 copy of Windows7 for BigDawg), I did some more reading and came up with installing the printer to a completely new port, and manually programming the network share for the printer into its 'location' entry (an old 'XP, "don't-know-what-else-to-do-to-get-this-thing-running" trick' for network printing). That seems to have solved it. Pisser that it has to be such a jacked-up way to set things up though. Most people will wind up paying The Geek Squad WAY too much money to have them attempt the same thing, give up, then sell them a new printer when there's nothing wrong with the one they already have.

Still gotta get my MacBook Pro to be happy living in the Windows network environment, though. Maybe I'll throw it a bone and install Unbuntu or Fedora onto BigDawg and make it my central server. I don't know... maybe later, we'll see.

So after a couple days of now having to squint while looking at the CRT (after having gotten the MBP, I decided to start checking out newer LCDs. I was wanting a 24" widescreen, but there weren't any to be had locally (I prefer checking them out in-person and walking out with one if that's what I decide on).

I researched the Viewsonic, Dell, HP, and LG LCDs that Best Buy had and went to the store Friday night. The biggest one they had was a 23" widescreen... so I figured that would be good enough. In watching the canned video on all of the screens, I was disappointed with just about every one of them that was in the price range I wanted had bad refresh lag, leaving artifacts as things zipped across the screen, or were not all that much brighter and crispier than my CRT. Then I saw the LG E2350V LED-backlit LCD was the only one not doing any of that - it was pretty sweet, in fact. Then I saw the Samsung SyncMaster in action (the almost-$400 screen) and it wasn't even as bright and smooth as the LG E2350V I was looking at. So, I saw the price was only about $60 more than the non-LED-backlit LG I was looking at, so I decided to get it.

I got it home, plugged it in and was really happy when Windows 7 discovered the bigger screen and auto-adjusted the resolution to max. SWEET!

Now I'm finally up-to-speed with my machine not having a clunky old CRT monitor dominating my desk. All I can say to my friends who pick on me about some of the techie things I do - I'm glad I waited and didn't just go out and snag the 1st-gen LCDs... the LED-backlit is the only way to go.

So a few weeks ago, a buddy asked about helping him repair a MacBook Pro (A1226) that he fished out of a dumpster - the LCD had two 1-inch-wide vertical 'dead zone' stripes blocking part of the desktop. It also had a password lock from the previous owner who tossed it out after he [most likely] dropped it. So I brought it home and worked on getting past the password - no biggee. Mac OSX is very Linux-like, so it was no problem to reset the password from a command prompt. After I informed my friend that the password was cracked, he ordered a new LED-backlit LCD to replace the damaged screen.

A few days later, it showed up. So I got onto powerbookmedic.com and watched repair videos to see how to tear it apart. I had the LCD replaced and the whole thing all back together after about an hour and was playing with the machine in no time. The next day, I took the machine back to him and asked what he was going to do with it. He said his daughter wanted a Mac and he was going to give it to her. She also had a newer Dell laptop that she might be interested in selling, so I told him to let me know what she decided to do - LapDawg isn't getting any younger, after all. I told him if she wanted to get rid of the Dell to make me a deal... and if she didn't like the MacBook Pro, to let me know and I'd give him what he had into the machine so far... which he was cool with.

I got a call the very next Saturday (I gave him the machine back on Tuesday) saying she couldn't get used to using the Mac and asked if I was still interested. Which... YEAH - of course! He was wanting to get his $375 back, which was fine with me. So, he brought it in the following Monday, paid him, and took possession of the machine. $375 for a slightly-used 2.5-yr-old $2200 machine... I can live with that.

So far, so good. It's an awesome little laptop. The LED-backlit LCD is WAY brighter and crispier than my 21" CRT... which is making me want a new monitor for the desktop since it looks all tired compared to the MBP's new screen... kinda like when you buy some brand-new white sneakers and wear old white socks with them. Blah. Oh well, 24" LCDs are relatively cheap these days.

I spent the evening trying to get the the Mac to live on my Windows network so I can share files and printers and stuff. I haven't quite gotten it all squared away yet, but it's fun playing with a new toy. After poking around on this machine a bit, I've also discovered some great applications that the previous owner installed and looks like never used. Adobe CS3, Microsoft Office (at least Word and Excel that I've noticed so far), iTunes (of course - which I'm jamming to 'KISS - Rock and Roll All Night' on one of the streaming 80s Rock Stations). I also watched '24' on the machine when the cable company scrambled my DVR's channels this past Monday evening which caused it to not record.

I also snagged a nice Logitech M305 wireless laser mouse to use with it since I'm not quite used to the one-button mouse thing (Mac weirdness...). It installed right onto the machine and works great. Now I can even right-click and scroll and everything (like things are supposed to be) without having to do some weird three-key salutes or whatever other kind of Mac-robatics needed for the same functions that Windows users are accustomed to.

I must say I'm very pleased and quite impressed with the machine so far. It seems to be very powerful and of course having newer equipment never hurts. My other laptop (LapDawg) is a 2004 model Dell Inspiron 600M and is showing its age. So, I guess I have scored yet another awesome 'puter deal. Now, I just need to get it broken in and integrated into my network so I can dump my music and other cool stuff onto it for when I'm feeling like being a laptop user.

So, I've been running Window$7 RC since last summer, and it was running like a champ. A few days ago, I start getting this 'nagware' about Win7 RC shutting off 1 March. Crap. That means I need to go buy a copy of Window$7 to keep using it. No biggie... except that if I'd bought during the pre-order days, I could've gotten a 'Family Pack' of 3 licenses for around $150-ish. Now, I'm stuck with $319 for a copy of Ultimate (because I needed the XP Retro-support and wanted to try 64-bit... which Ultimate also has 32-bit included in case 64-bit blows up).

So far, so good. Everything went well... and I'm getting my other applications plugged in as well. I also upgraded my Office to 2007, since there's a Government-Employee Home-Use program, I was able to get Office 2007 for $22. Hey - why not? (Also got Symantec End-Point Anti Virus for free through the same program...)

OK - so here's another entry with some actual news.

... is good news, I suppose. Everything's still behavin', so I ain't messing with it.

OK - I finally got this turd working again... sort of. The forums are still down (like who really cares, anyway...) and the EasyPHP Calendar won't work right, causing the PHP version of the front page to not load properly. Whatever... the calendar has never worked right anyway, so no big loss there.

The big thing is that I got the webserver reloaded, PHP and MySQL working somewhat so I can have my blogs back, and we'll go from there.

Thank you Randy, for your advice in dumping the entire 'data' folder back into MySQL, rather than just the folders I thought it needed.

Now, it's a matter of getting all of these blogs to 'cross post' so I can stop having to post the same entry on several blogs when it's pertinent to more than one topic (like this one, for instance). But that's for another day... as long as this pile keeps running and FTP stays up, that is.

Edit: Alright - so I lied... the forums are up. I had them redirected wrongly in the link on the front page. After all the hassle I've had with this stuff, I'll take whatever I can get.

OK - I've been neglecting my blogs and everything else on my site since the last entries. I'm going to do a better job of keeping things updated this year... it's the least I can do since I spend a lot of wasted time on my machines these days anyway.

One of the first things I'm going to attempt is consolidating these individual blogs so that I can 'cross-post' things and have a better system. As it is right now, if I post something that happened with the Honda on the 'Hatch Blog,' one must go to the 'Hatch Blog' to read it - which means I sometimes have to copy the post into the main blog if it's the only newsworthy thing I do during the day. Once I consolidate everything, I should be able to make a post (no matter what the topic) and it will be displayed in 'Basic Blah' (main blog for news) as well as the specific category it addresses. Then, if someone only wants to read about the Honda, or my computer stuff, or the Jeep (a future blog category I'm working on), they can choose those specific things. It probably doesn't make much sense the way I'm explaining it here, but I should have it squared away sometime this week or so.

Otherwise - everything's hangin' in there. I am getting the itch to build a new HTPC machine, since the DVR is acting flaky these days.

Holy Cow - all three blogs updated on the same day.

Of course, all three of them say pretty much the same thing - nothing significant happened today.

So, about the time she got the Trojan on her machine, mind decided it was time to mess up again. This time, it decided to act like it had only 32MB RAM and a 20MB Hard Drive - Windows would come up and run fine for about a minute into the desktop, then the HDD light would just strobe every second or so and nothing would happen. The mouse would be fine as well as the 'Lock' keys functioned fine.

Occasionally, I when I would restart the machine, I'd notice that it couldn't find the HDD at all to boot from. I noticed in the BIOS sometimes it wasn't there. After cracking open the case, I discovered what appeared to be a 'loose' SATA cable. No biggie - just swap in a new one. Still no effect on the problem.

So, last night I decided to swap the original Maxtor HDD back in, since I'd rehabbed it in BigDawg by slicking the boot partition after all the WinXP weirdness.

Now it's back in the machine with Windows 7 RC running and so far, so good.

If it craps out again though - I'm tossing all this junk out and getting a whole new box. This thing has been WAY too much of a PITA - especially since BigDawg is still sitting right under the desk and hasn't even puked once in 2 years.

'Newer' doesn't always mean 'better.'

OK - so McAffee did its usual fine job of finding exactly nothing. The trojan was even smart enough to jack up the Group permissions so that anybody or any group with any kind of administrator rights was stopped from executing them.

I actually went file-by-file through the 'C' drive and hacked out anything that had yesterday's date listed and poked through the registry. It still booted fine and ran with no signs of any malicious code - except for the Admin permissions being trashed. So, I popped the XP setup disk in and ran it with the 'Repair' option. Apparently Windows was so jacked up now that it performed a re-install... but decided to take pity on me and not wipe out all of the accounts and settings.

Once back up to the desktop, I was able to finally run the Trojan Remover I d/l's last night and it couldn't find anything either. Symantec AV (government version) gave the 'all-clear' as well. Who knows what else is messed up - but again... not my machine.

If it's too jacked up even after all that, I guess a flush and reinstall is in order.

Whatever.

Great - she got some kind of a Trojan on her machine yesterday. So last night, I tried everything I had in my toolbox: Winternals ERD 2003, Windowz XP Bart PE (older versions of McAffee Stinger, Ad-Aware, SpyBot S & D, and something else that didn't work). That was after attempting to run the already installed A/V and Anti-Spyware utilities through Safe-Mode with no luck, since it essentially locked out the Administrator account from the utilities. Also tried to install Norton Internet Security 2009, but again - admin functions are locked out.

The trojan (won't even let me get a good ID) has installed itself pretty much everywhere on the 'C' drive, and attempts to send e-mails to the 'mother ship' once Windows comes up.

So today, I learned how to build my own Windows XP Bart PE bootable CD with the latest versions of Ad-Aware and McAffee Stinger I could find. Trouble is, people have kinda lost interest in the Bart PE project and aren't providing a lot of support in the way of updated definitions and plug-ins. Took me an hour just to find the latest definition files for Ad-Aware SE, since they moved away from SE and have a newer version now. Never did find the AntiVir plug-ins.

But, I got the XP Bart PE CD built and booted about a half hour ago. Stinger's still deep-scanning the 'C' drive, and I still have Ad-Aware yet to run. So hopefully, I'll get this one taken care of without having to flush and reload. If not - oh well - nobody can say I haven't given this my best effort.

Alright! So I got Windows 7 RC from a pal and installed it last night after I got it home. The Beta I had was an early version and had somehow expired - it gave me the whole 'gonna shut down in an hour' type message, so I bugged Jim for the RC. He had already burned me a copy and had it with him.

Got home, tossed it on the machine and things are good. The Beta I had seemed to have more cool stuff with it, but oh well... none of it was stuff I'm likely to use anyway. I guess that's how they hook you - promise all sorts of cool stuff early on, then when you get closer to the real deal, they yank some of it back.

I was also happy to find that nVidia had some '7' drivers for my ASUS GeForce 8500 vid card... so everything actually looks a bunch crisper and brighter on this old 21" Dell CRT of mine... even at 1600x1200. I'm still trying to dump the resolution back down to more reasonable levels, but it drops the image size and centers it, rather than drop the resolution and stretch to fit the monitor. Kinda sucks, but I've got it back out to 1600x1200, and just zoom in the web pages that are tough to read. (Sigh) Oh well - progress, right?

I was also happy to find a cool Mahjong game added to the stack of games offered. Sad - all this new computer horsepower goodness, and I'm playing Spider Solitaire and Microsoft Mahjong.

So apparently, I've been on the Computer Gods' Shit-List for the past two weeks or so. Probably had something to do with all my waving of the middle finger in their general direction during my time. I figured we were past all that, but apparently they hold grudges.

Anyway, after fighting with TopDawg for the past week, I've discovered a few things:

• The ASUS board causes some hard drive weirdness - usually resulting in a bad block or sector in the primary boot partition. This caused the installation of whatever OS I attempted to lock up and hang the machine when it hit bad block/sector.
• The heatsink that came with the AMD 7750 I bought this week absolutely sucks and is completely inadequate. After swapping the 'old' heatsink from the AMD 5000 I originally had for this machine, things cooled down immensely inside the box.
• The MSI board has crappy audio, but at least it runs. Maybe I'll snag an add-on sound card somewhere.
• I can literally change out the motherboard and internals on this machine in the dark. My computer room is almost a cave when the lights are off, and I was just fed-up enough with having to swap back to the MSI mobo that I didn't even bother with the lights. I did cheat and use an LED Mini-Mag for the front panel connections to the mobo though.

Basically, I'm guessing I received a bad motherboard almost 18 months ago when I originally built this machine for my pal Mike. The 'symptoms' (as I call them) migrated from the ASUS mobo to the MSI through the hard drive because when the ASUS would crap out, it would leave the bad block/sector on the hard drive. When I would use the hard drive with the MSI mobo, the bad block/sector was already there, and since I had data on it, I wasn't willing to repair and format the whole thing. The original hard drive I thought might've been bad has been repaired and is running like a champ in BigDawg (who's waiting to become my next webserver... another story of having pissed off the Computer Gods).

Right now, I've got TopDawg running on a Windows 7 Beta, which I intended to upgrade to the RC and snag a copy of 7 Ultimate when it goes on sale. I guess I need to run the hot-rod with a new OS, but my old junk can just swing with whatever's leftover. Win2K Adv Server and XP have served me faithfully for many years now, and I can't see the reason to quit using them for project machines just because Microsoft has quite supporting the OS - I rarely use Windows Updater to manage my junk anyway.

But for now, so far - so good. We'll see how long this all runs with Win7 Beta. If it blows up, everything except the case and my data gets thrown out and I build a hot-rod Ubuntu box and call it good.

So I picked up a new CPU yesterday from a local shop I know and trust. It's an AMD Athlon X2 7750 (AM2+ socket, and an absolute rocket). I figured, why not - try the CPU since all of the other symptoms migrated between changing the motherboards, RAM, and hard drives, so the only thing really left are the CPU and Video Card (yeah, right... like a bad video card would be the problem).

I decided since I was going to be trying a new CPU that I'd swap back to the original ASUS M2N SLI-Deluxe mobo. Swapping it back in was no big deal... everything went fine. The ASUS board is quite a bit bigger than the MSI board, but there's plenty of room in the case.

I did some reading and discovered that in order to run the AM2+ CPU, I'd have to flash the BIOS to the 1701 version. No worries. That went quick and painless with the ASUS EZ Flash utility in the BIOS.

Fired it up and it ran through the XP setup fairly quick... until it made it to the '35 minutes to go - Installing Devices' section... then it seems to hang for some reason. I just found something in the BIOS that's Vista-specific when enabled... so I disabled it and turned off the SMART Hard Drive feature as well. Other than that, the RAM is timed properly (4-4-4-4-12) and everything should be good to go with the 'Auto' settings.

Beats me why this pile won't run right.

I snagged a 4-port USB/SVGA KVM with cables from MWave.com for less than $60... now I'm just too lazy to install the damn thing. This means I'll have to tear apart the whole desk again just to run the cables, and I really don't feel like doing that today.

The Logitech keyboard is working great, and I know I need to do it so I can have full functionality over the other machines. But, screw it - I've still got the Microsoft POS plugged in and can swap over to the other machines if I have to with it. Maybe one of these days next week, I'll get off me arse and do it right.

So I got this Logitech keyboard plugged into TopDawg. I'm not entirely sure if I like it or not. The keyboard's not a 'natural' style, so it feels weird sitting here at my machine without having a natural style keyboard.

So far though, the keys seem to be much more sure of themselves when I push on them. The Shift and Ctrl keys seem to hold the signal better as well. The only sucky part is that the whole deal is USB-driven. I tried plugging the receiver into a PS2-USB adapter and no-go - it doesn't provide enough power for the receiver to, well, receive, and play 'keyboard' at the same time.

As I sit here typing this, I'm getting used to the feel of it, and I kind like how the 'wave' part of the keyboard works. I'll probably leave it plugged in and figure out what I need to do to keep it in use. I might just have to buy a new KVM (a USB KVM instead of the PS2/SVGA unit I have. I don't know... we'll have to see how it goes. It's kind nice not dropping keystrokes anymore... can't say that with the Microsoft keyboard.

The wrist-rest (more like palm-rest) is made of some kind of porous leather-like material. Feels good, and doesn't let my hands slide around like the Microsoft keyboard. The old Logitech keyboard had a textured plastic 'rest which is polished smooth from where my hands rested.

I dunno. Probably have to mess with it a few days and figure out what I want to do. KVMs and all their cables are getting cheaper, after all.

When I built TopDawg, I decided I needed a new keyboard, primarily because everything on the desk is now black - except my trusty ol' white Logitech Cordless Freedom keyboard.

There was nothing wrong with it, mind you - except that it's not black.

So I snagged a really nice new-gen Microsoft Natural keyboard - only to discover that my 'dumb-ass' spell while in Office Depot had my buy a wired keyboard. No biggee - I'll just run the wire to the KVM and use the USB-PS2 adapter.

Bzzzzzt! Sorry... not gonna work. Microsoft doesn't like those things.

Crap.

So I went back and bought a wireless Microsoft natural keyboard, thinking it would be really great. And if it would work properly, it would be great. But no - my luck has this thing dropping keystrokes and not holding the signal when I press down the 'shift' or 'ctrl' keys while trying to use all the shortcuts I've grown accustomed to.

Double Crap!

So tonight I snagged a Logitech Wireless Wave Pro keyboard, hoping I'll be able to make it work. I'll mess with it this weekend.

BTW - the reason I'm so picky is because after all these years of using PCs, I still haven't developed carpal-tunnel or anything of the sort... so I must be doing something right. That, and my KVM works by hitting 'Scroll Lock' twice and selecting the number of the switch position for the machine I want to go to - I have 4 of them on this switch. So my keyboard MUST have Scroll Lock functionality. Most of the ones I've seen in trying to weed out the others haven't had the key. Hopefully, this new one will. If not - maybe I'll just take the ol' trusty white Logitech Cordless Freedom outside and rattle-can it black or something.

Reloaded TopDawg today. It had some nit-noid issues, probably brought on by the motherboard swap - it plugged through without demanding I re-install Windows... so I didn't. I suspect that I should've just done that all along. Oh well - it's all good now. The jury's still out on this new Microsoft wireless keyboard though. The left 'ctrl' button and occasionally some other keys don't register. I don't know if that's 'normal' or if I type too fact for the keyboard or what. It gets old. I guess I need to find a new, black wireless Logitech keyboard, since the original one was still plugging along just fine (it was white and I wanted a new black one is the only reason I swapped it).

Actually, I spoke too soon with that last post. The machine's crashing got worse and more frequent - to the point that I actually lost the week's worth of e-mail I'd accrued while working on the new machine - I can probably recover it if I really wanted to - but nah... too much hassle. Nothing really imperative anyway.

I installed the new MSI mobo on January 24th and it's been running like a champ since. I shut it off during the time I was TDY (for almost 2 weeks), but right back on when I got home, and it's been doing great. The temps are acceptable, and the machine seems to run great. I'm not so keen on the on-board sound card - it's not nearly as nice as the on-board ASUS puts on their mobos. It doesn't suck so bad that I feel the need to get an add-on sound card or anything... it just has a weird 'decrecendoing-fluttering' sound when the tunes wind-down during the fade-out. The software equalizer is tougher to make friends with as well - I've actually got the Winamp equalizer set 'flat' and the soundcard EQ running it's 'Powerful' settings... which sounds good... but still not as good as it did with the ASUS.

Other than that - the machine's a beast! It runs UT3 like nobody's business, and seems to do everything else just fine as well. I've got the majority of my stuff migrated over (minor stuff left now) and should be ready to build the new webserver out of BigDawg (next week after the CISSP test kicks my ass) and make the rest of my transitions happen.