Brettia

My old computer, Crampy, was on its last legs on Monday. I was having problems connecting to my web server, I couldn’t receive email, it was slow(er), I hadn’t been able to play DVDs in forever, and my video card drivers were out of date because I couldn’t seem to get the new ones to install. Now, however, after seven hours of installation and tweaking, everything is back to normal. And it’s so much faster! Unbelievably fast, in fact. I love it! It’s amazing how much better things will run when you don’t have old settings and files from 34,159,265,358 programs cluttering everything up.

One suggestion for anyone who reimages their PC: back up EVERYTHING! When you delete all partitions with fdisk and hit enter after typing format c:, everything will be gone! Some people don’t seem to realize that. I backed up everything, from the contents of my htdocs directory on my development webserver to everything in My Documents to my iTunes music. Compressed, it barely fit on two CDs, which, incidentally, was all I had. I got lucky, I guess. But it looked like my luck would run out when the reimaging program provided by HP started spewing out errors about bad files and CRC checksum inconsistencies. I just about had a heart attack, fearing the worst: that the reimaging would fail and I’d be left with a DOS prompt. I tried everything, and nothing worked. Just as I was about to give up, I was suddenly inspired to take the recovery CD out of the drive and check the bottom to see if it was scratched. There were no scratches, but there was a large ball of lint or dust stuck about halfway between the rim and the center. No wonder the drive couldn’t read the files! I breathed a sigh of relief and plunged onward.

Once the HP stuff was done, Windows 98 did its configuration stuff and I was finished with the first part of my journey. Next I uninstalled all of the crappy bundled programs that HP “provides” (perhaps “curses” would be better) users with. With that finished, I began the installation of Windows XP Home, which took about two hours, one conversion from FAT32 to NTFS, the deletion of Windows 98, and three reboots. Then I ran Windows Update and got XP Service Pack 1, which required another reboot. I installed the remaining updates, Windows Media Player 9 Series, the .NET Framework 1.1, and various smaller updates, which required two more reboots. Finally, I was able to install Office 2003 and Visual Basic .Net Standard (which is still installing now). That was the end to my Microsoft products.

Now I downloaded Firefox and Thunderbird from Mozilla.org, installed and configured them, and downloaded extensions and themes for them. Next was iTunes, and I copied my settings, library data files, and my songs over from a back up CD. I also copied the stuff from My Documents back to where it needed to be, and I restored my usual desktop wallpaper, video settings, and resolution. Then I installed WinZIP, WordWeb Pro, and What Pulse (the three Ws). I read a few websites while doing this and came upon a beta version of Windows Media Player 10, which I downloaded and installed as well.

With most of the major stuff done, I moved on to the development environment. I installed Apache 2.0.49, MySQL 4.0.20a, and PHP 4.3.6, along with phpMyAdmin 2.5.6. Crimson Editor and FileZilla soon followed, as well as Paint Shop Pro 8.1 and Photoshop CS (trial version). I also installed IMTranslator, a free English < => Spanish translator from Paralink. And now…I’m done. Whew.

A Listing of Programs I Have Installed

Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition SP2 Build 2042

This is a beta edition of XP SP2 (service pack 2) which is not freely available to the public. However, you can find it on various warez sites and IRC channels with enough searching (though I am a legitimate beta tester).

Microsoft Office 2003 Professional

I was able to get a single-user license for Office 2003 for only $20. Not amazed? You will be when I tell you that the normal price for this license is $500. Yes, $500. Definitely more than anyone should have to pay. You can get the student and teacher edition for $150, though, but it’s still not as good as Professional. The reason I got such a steep discount is because my mom’s company, Albertsons (without the apostrophe), was nice enough to provide a home use program through Microsoft for its employees so that they could work at home more easily. I think it was intended more for people who didn’t have Office at all (I had Office 2000 before), but I read the license agreement and I suppose I’m okay.

Mozilla Firefox

I know I plug Firefox every fifteen seconds, but I only do it because it helps me in two major ways. First, it warms my heart to know that I’m making a difference and saving them the hassle of popups and rogue ActiveX controls and viruses that comes with using Internet Explorer. Okay, so I don’t really care about how positively it impacts the life of the converted IE user, but I do care about the fact that Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine renders (X)HTML 31415% better than Internet Explorer’s. Because Firefox is almost completely standards-compliant, I rarely have to worry if code will display correctly in it. I have to worry about how IE will handle it with every change I make to a page because IE has a tendency to randomly position items however it wants. For a web designer, this can mean hours of debugging, and this is only for the latest version of IE, version 6. Earlier versions and the Macintosh version all have different quirks, making some features impossible to implement. With this blog, I haven’t tested the code in IE at all. If you care enough about the layout to be annoyed when it displays badly in IE, then you can download Firefox for free from the convenient link at the top of the page and be absolved of your sins against the web developer community.

Mozilla Thunderbird

After a brief period of time using Outlook 2003, I recently switched back to Thunderbird because it just works better and faster. I don’t need Outlook’s calendar and tasks and journaling features, and it’s junk mail filter kind of sucks compared to Thunderbird’s. Also, Thunderbird is a companion product to Firefox, which makes it even better.

Crimson Editor

Though not well known, Crimson Editor is the perfect lightweight, multipupose editor for any kind of programming, be it for the web or for the desktop. It also has built-in FTP editing support, so you can edit files on a remote web server as if they were on your computer, which is a nice feature that you don’t see much in other programs.

iTunes 4.5

Just download it. That’s all I can say. Just get it, install it, and be amazed at its sleek beauty and impressive playback quality (though songs are only 128kbps quality, and I would prefer 160kbps). Then there’s iTMS, the iTunes Music Store, which has over 500,000 tracks for downloading at 99 cents each. They don’t have everything, but they do have most of the music that’s worth buying.

Xteq-Dotec X-Setup 6.6 Pro

X-Setup is a tweaking program for Windows that lets you change settings that are not normally available for the changing. Most of the settings only make sense to advanced users, so I would recommend TweakUI or TuneXP instead if you are afraid that you’ll mess something up.

Tweak UI / PowerCalc

Tweak UI is a nice little program released by Microsoft as a Windows XP powertoy. It is very much like X-Setup, though it lets you change less features, and only those that are approved by Microsoft. PowerCalc is another powertoy that gives you a full-featured graphing calculator to replace the normal Windows calculator. (Very helpful for algebra :D)

TuneXP 1.5

TuneXP is another tweaking program distributed by driverheaven.net. It contains settings and optimizations not found in X-Setup or TweakUI, some of which increase speed considerably. It also comes with helpful documentation to keep you from enabling a tweak that shouldn’t be enabled.

FileZilla

FileZilla is a free, open-source project hosted by SourceForge. It is a very robust FTP client similar to WS_FTP or CuteFTP, but free. (Note the running “free” theme here.)

IMTranslator

This program is VERY useful when it comes to translating words and phrases. It supports several languages, but I use it most for translating words from English to Spanish and back. Definitely worth getting for any student enrolled in a Spanish class.

Paint Shop Pro 8.1

This is a great program with a somewhat cheesy name. It’s no Photoshop, but it still does a very good job when it comes to simpler photo-editing tasks. I think it actually does vectors and paths better than Photoshop 7 does, though I haven’t checked to see if Photoshop CS has been improved in that area.

Photoshop CS

Here is the grand-daddy of all graphics programs. If you want to do something with an image, Photoshop can do it. All you have to do is know how, which is the hard part. The $650 fee to buy it is steep, but all professional-grade programs are like that. Besides, students can get it for the low, low price of $260.

Microsoft Visual Basic .NET Standard

Normally priced at about $100, I got this program for free by filling out response forms and watching a few online movies on Microsoft’s MSDN site. I don’t know if I’ll ever use it, but it was free!

Apache 2.0.49

With a 70% market share, Apache is by far the most popular server package on the Internet. Even better, it’s free too. It comes preinstalled with most Linux distributions, or you can download the Windows version from their website.

MySQL 4.0.20a

This is the latest version of the MySQL database server, one of the fastest in the world, though it is somewhat lacking in features compared to PostgreSQL. MySQL has been known to outperform such corporate heavyweights as Oracle 9i and Microsoft SQL Server. Not bad, considering it’s free.

PHP 4.3.6

PHP 4.3.6 is the latest stable version of the PHP interpreted scripting language, which is what I use for my various projects. It also powers this blog, which is run using WordPress.

This is probably not everything, but it’s most of it. Just Google the name of the product if you want to download it; I don’t have the time to go find all the links right now (maybe later).

QuickTip

If you just can’t find that old video game in stores, check Amazon. I recently hunted about for Heroes of Might and Magic III (a very popular game back in 1999), and could find it nowhere. Amazon had it, and I got it for only $12 plus shipping and handling, whereas Dylan got it at EB Games (he got the last copy there) for $15. Not bad, eh?

“I’ve been whorepooned!” - Dylan, accidentally mispronouncing “harpooned.” Don’t ask.