Philip Norton

I saw this great site the other day called Proud To Be Apple Free. Naturally it is all about annoying Mac users are. Actually that should be iUser as they seem to have this fixation about putting the letter i in front of every product they produce.  Which is intensely irritating!

Personally I wouldn’t buy a Mac, not unless I won the lottery and wanted something pretty to play with. I have used a Mac at work and as a development platform it I can’t imagine a system that is more annoying to use than a Mac. Most of what you need to do with anything is hidden behind several layers of crap, the idea being that most people don’t want to use it. Well I do want to use it, but after messing about with the very strange file manager for a couple of hours I found out I had to use the command line to get more access to the system, but even then everything is hidden!

It just works huh? Only if you want to paint pictures all day long. I want to write code!

I got my computer back today. I got a Asus EAX-1050 graphics card from a local shop in Congelton. It is quite low powered, but should do me for a few months. I can’t afford a brilliant card at the moment, but I was contemplating getting a good laptop to replace the desktop in a few months. I don’t trust the desktop as it has a habit of crashing and blowing up components.

My old faithful graphics card has finally given up. I started playing X3 today and it just crashed. When I tried to restart I was met with a screen full of ASCII characters. Looks like a quick trip to a local shop might be in order. Pity as the XFX 6600 GT I was running was a good card.

I was just thinking the other day that my computer was running fine, and I hadn’t needed to re-install it for at least 6 months. However, I think I might have thought too soon as when I got home on Thursday it was acting very odd. For some reason it wouldn’t allow me to paste text into Word and it kept spontaneously logging me off of the internet chat program I use (Pidgin). So I do what I normally do in that situation and restarted the machine to see if it would be okay.

The answer was a big no. The thing wouldn’t start again. It would get to a file called “mup.sys” and just utterly fail. No amount of fiddling would stop this file crashing the machine. Looking into mup.sys it seems to be a resource controller file, so I can only assume that whatever it was controlling was corrupt. It has taken me 2 days to get the thing back into working order as I had to make sure I have backed up all of my files. It’s still a pain in the posterior.

I like Microsoft, I think they do a pretty good job, and their usability is quite good as well. But why can’t they make an operating system that doesn’t need a full reinstall ever 6 months? It’s getting a bit annoying really. I have tried to move over to Linux (I have SUSE 10 installed on my other hard drive) but I just don’t know where everything is, and anything even slightly complicated involves editing system files and using the command prompt.

Still, everything is sorted now so I should be aright for another 6 months.

I have finally got the computer up an running. I had to get a 160 gig hard disc from ebuyer.co.uk, but it now works as good as new. What is a pain is that I haven´t managed to save all of my files. My FreeNAS server is doing well and keeping backups of all of my important stuff, but I lost all of my videos and every save game I have ever made.

As we are quite strapped for cash at the moment (broke really) I could only afford a 160 gig disc. I suppose when we have more money I can get another drive of the same capacity and install SuSE onto it.