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29 August 2007

I was wondering around a superstore the other evening when the black Windows Vista box caught my eye... It says there, right under where "Windows Vista Ultimate" is written, "The most complete Windows ever" or something like that.
What I would like to know is.... Why would anyone want an incomplete operating system? I don't care if it is the "most complete". I want an operating system which is "complete".
Still, I have to admit that the most expensive software purchases I have personally paid for in the past couple of years has been 2 retail boxes of Windows XP Professional. Of all the people I know personally who have tried Windows Vista (usually bundled with their computers), almost all of them have either purchased Windows XP or have somehow acquired a DVD. One person even considers installing XP Home an upgrade over the bundled Vista Home Premium. For all of Windows XP's flaws, it never drove people to install Windows ME. I have to confess that I haven't actually used Vista long enough to be as frustrated with it as those people but to be perfectly frank, Windows XP Pro does everything I need out of an OS when I need to use it.
There are a few new pieces of software which I will purchase in the near future when they are released: Mac OS 10.5 which I will probably buy the family pack and the expensive one: eComStation 2.0 - partly for nostalgia's sake but I also have a unopened, still in shrink wrap, Hopkins FBI for OS/2 which I have been thinking about trying for the past couple of years.

20 August 2007

It looks like Kingston Technology is serious about their Lifetime Warranty on their products. A little under a week has passed since I had sent them the memory which had gone faulty - and it didn't cost me a penny. They paid for the FedEx shipping both ways. The replacement module looks a little different than the returned and the new modules I had purchased immediately after the failure: They all had identical track layout unlike the replacements. It all seems to work though. The machine has correctly identified the modules and so now it has 4.5G RAM.
On a little side note - I tried to post this message earlier today but the Google Blogger site appeared to be down for maintenance.

07 August 2007

Yay, the new memory arrived. I am glad that I didn't splash out and only paid for the standard delivery - it arrived next day. The machine was getting a little slow without the memory even with a lighter workload than normal - the swap had grown to 1.5Gb after a day's use. I still need to get a RMA for the old memory so I can send it back for replacement...

05 August 2007

Oh Joy.... The past few days, my Mac started crashing randomly, usually just applications or a MySQL test run would show that the server SIGSEGV. Quite annoying. Today, it locked up complely. Not even the mouse cursor could move and it didn't even show the MacOS kernel panic message. So enough was enough. I found the MacOS install CD and started the Apple Hardware Test. Kicked off the extended test and wandered away to do other stuff. When I came back, I was greeted with a message that the memory was faulty:

2MEM/1/4:DIMM3/J7000

It's well beyond the Fry's 30day replacement but definitely less than a year... so I will have to call Kingston on Monday for a RMA number for it. Meanwhile, I'll order some replacement memory so that the machine won't be crippled for too long... besides which, when the replacement memory comes back, I will have a bit more memory to do stuff with.