Yesterday, I reformatted my main work PC.  It had belonged to someone else before I started working here, and when I started, I didn't think to take the time to wipe it down and rebuild it to make sure there wasn't any lingering wonkiness from old applications or files.  Well, after three months of me adding and removing my own software as needed, the system reached a point where pasting an image into Photoshop to resize was a serious undertaking that pushed the machine to the very edge of its capabilities.  Now, I know Photoshop is a hog, and it's the age old joke of no matter how much RAM you have, it's only "almost" enough to run Photoshop, but this was just embarrassing performance for a Pentium D 2.8GHz with a gig of RAM.  This sluggishness showed up when doing other taxing tasks such as loading up Firefox or IE.  The hard drive was continuously thrashing, even though the disk was showing only 20% full and wasn't fragmented in the least.  So yesterday, I bit the bullet, backed up all my files to an external drive, and started over.

Now, installing Windows XP is just old-hat.  I've done it countless times on my home machines, for friends, family and in my various jobs in the past 5 years.  There's nothing tricky and I had all my drivers on a USB flash drive ready to reinstall when I was done.  I started backing up a gig of files around 1:00pm and by 2:00pm I had Windows running largely configured.  By 3:00pm I had almost all of my basic software reinstalled (Firefox, Photoshop, Office, FrontPage, IM apps, IRC etc...)  The last task was to restore my email.

Up to this point, I had been using Mozilla Thunderbird.  It's a nice, basic mail application that doesn't have any bells or whistles.  It runs well and does the email thing just fine.  However, as I find myself with more and more on my plate, more tasks to keep track of, and in general trying to keep sorted a growing amount of information, Thunderbird was showing some significant weaknesses.  It just doesn't have the additional features I needed, namely calendaring and a task list.  So, it's back to Outlook for me.  Despite my irritations with how it handles some things, and how it has the typical MS interface design stupidity, Outlook is probably the best overall information management app for Windows at the moment.

I fire up Outlook and go to import my Thunderbird mailboxes and contacts.  The contacts would only transfer by doing them as a CSV and then doing about 20min of editing in Outlook to make them work right again.  The mail itself though?  Not quite so lucky.  Turns out that Thunderbird, despite many complaints from users, has NO EXPORT FEATURE!

Yes, that's right.  A feature that every mail client I've used since Eudora 1 is missing from Thunderbird.  The ability to quickly and easily move the contents of my mail from Thunderbird to another mail application does not exist.  I have been "locked-in" to Thunderbird.  Let us pause for a moment to reflect on the irony of this situation.

Ok... moving on.

My messages are all there, I know they are, I can see them with Thunderbird.  But I can't get them into any format Outlook can import (and outlook can import a fair number of file types, and export a few too).  I know there's a way to get this all working, so I turn to Google, the repository of all human knowledge worth knowing, for the answer to this issue.  Turns out this is a very common problem people run into as I found numerous forum and blog posts bemoaning the fact that they can't get their email back out of Thunderbird in any easy manner.  A little more digging turned up the solution.  Here are the steps in a nutshell:

1. Open your c:\Documents & Settings\%user\%app_data\Thunderbird\xxxxxx.profile\ folder
2. Find the file names for your mail boxes, the boxes themselves have no file extension (i.e. Inbox, Sent, Trash...)
3. Copy the folders you want to recover to another folder on your PC
4. Rename the folders to %Folder_Name.mbox
5. Download a freeware program called mbox2eml, install
6. Run mbox2eml on each of the .mbox files
7. This will result in a folder with individual .eml files for every email message in the mailbox
8. Open Outlook Express
9. Select all the .eml files in the folder, and drag them over the open Outlook Express window.  This will import them into Outlook express
10. Export the contents of Outlook Express to Outlook.
11. Cry as about a quarter of your emails are gibberish now since there is no direct translation from mbox to eml files, and some of your messages had a flaky character or bit of formatting that it couldn't handle.  If you want those messages, you'll have to read through the raw text of the message to get all the data, but you won't be able to fix the headers in your mailbox.  Those messages, for the average user, are gone.

There is absolutely no reason on earth I should have had to go through all of that to get my messages into Outlook.  It should have been a matter of exporting from Thunderbird and importing into Outlook.  Done.  No muss, no fuss.  Especially since so many people love to tout Thunderbird as being ready for the average user.  That it's just as full-featured and stable as anything you could want in that market-space.  Well, if the average user ever has to switch email clients for any reason (like lets say, their job requires it, or say Thunderbird development ever stops moving forward and the app gets abandoned), they're up a creek without a paddle unless they can find a computer geek nearby to take them through the arcane steps listed above.  Even moderately technical users familiar with the workings of import/export features in their office apps won't be able to puzzle that one out.

Ultimately though, the biggest issue I have is that so many Open Source apps tend to make it difficult to abandon them and move to an alternative product.  Settings, data files etc don't export, they're in some "open" format but no other application out there uses it or knows how to import it, or they're crippled when converting to certain applications.  When anyone points these sorts of issues out, they get one of several responses:

• Want an export feature? Code it yourself!  It's Open Source, you have the code right there, make it yourself.
• Why would you want to go from Thunderbird to Outlook?  Outlook is just a part of the M$ vendor-lock-in monopoly!
• None of the developers see any reason why anyone would want to export their mail, since Thunderbird is just the best there is.
• It's Microsoft's fault for not building a translator to import our files!

Not a single one of those is a valid or reasoned response to the request for a BASIC feature that everyone else seems to have mastered.  It's all a part of the high-and-mighty "Our way is the best way, because it's ethically and morally superior to proprietary, closed-source software" attitude that seems to permeate every nook and cranny of the open source world.  It results in its own form of "lock-in", that dreaded and evil concept where a vendor makes software such that you can not switch to a competitor without losing a significant amount of time and/or data.  Guess what?  I lost a few hours of my time getting my email sorted out because of this, and lost several dozen messages to an inaccurate conversion between formats.  Imagine the kind of cost this task would incur for any organization trying to make a similar transition... it would be horribly expensive in terms of lost productivity and data. 

But I guess lock-in is OK, if you're locked in to software that is "morally superior"

Don't get me wrong, I like Open Source Software and the ideals behind it.  I use it when it fits my needs (I love FireFox) but I'm not brainwashed on the whole absolute superiority to proprietary software thing.  If a tool provides better features, usability and performance, I'll go with that, regardless of who made it and how.  But I can't stand it when OSS pulls the same dirty tricks as closed-source software, but it's considered OK when OSS does it.

Until this day I have only run Linux on old outdated hardware, primarily for experimenation or for server use. But today I decided to install it on an old but relatively speedy laptop to test the desktop experience. The laptop has a 2Ghz P4 processor, 512MB of ram and a 32MB ATI card. Installing Ubuntu on older hardware before have been difficult so I was a bit weary of spending my entire day of installing it on my laptop.

The overall impression of the installation was very positive. I could use the partitioning program to resize my existing NTFS-partition and I managed to squeeze two additional partitions besides the XP-partition that I am going to keep around for a while. Novice users would probably feel a bit intimidated by the text-based installer and all the questions during the installation process, but for me it worked very well.

The only thing that was really annoying was that Ubuntu did not properly configure my wireless network card. It identified the chipset (Atheros) correctly but there were no WPA options available. More on the wireless issue later.

With the exception of the wireless issue the operating system installed smoothly and upon booting I realized that I had installed from an old beta version of Dapper Drake. A quick search on the Ubuntu forums (which are quite good) revealed that everything I needed to do was to run an update.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

The download of all updates went quite fast using a mirror in Sweden. In contrast to the XP reinstallation I had to do the previous month,it was a real breeze. No multiple restarts, just one download, one reboot and everything was in place. The reboot was probably unnecessary since I did not upgrade the kernel, but I thought that it wouldn't hurt.

I had to do quite a bit of surfing before finding information regarding how to setup my wireless network card. It is a common Netgear WG511T and finally I just surfed by a page that recommended installing network-manager-gnome. A simple installation and a reboot later I had a network-manager symbol in my systray (or whatever its counterpart is called within Gnome) that allowed me to connect to my NetGear router using WPA.

I wish that the installation disk would include that program already, perhaps it does in the 6.06 installer.

A more annoying issue with Ubuntu(and much of the Linux world) is the exclusion of binary software for which the source code is not open. I really like Open Source, I do, and I use a lot of open programs if they are a viable alternative. Sometimes OSS software is superior, sometimes it is a cheaper alternative that proves to be sufficient. But still I want Codecs, Media Players, DVD-support and good graphic drivers available from the start. I don't really care that the OSS community is trying to make a point, I will still need to install this to have a fully functional system.

Fortunately I had heard of a script called Automatix that would install much of this more or less automatically. It worked well and installed all the parts I think should have been included in first place. Not much of a hassle for me but it is still an unnecessary additional step IMO.

The Ubuntu desktop is really nice, IMO. Very clean and simple and I like the brownish colours. This is the first Linux desktop that I would dare to put into the hands of my mother.

Now I will play around a little and see if it is as good as it looks.

Just some random minor notes comparing Ubuntu to XP running on the same laptop:
* XP GUI is a bit snappier to respond to input.
* I really like the update management in Ubuntu. Having all packages under one umbrella ensures that you have the latest software at a simple click. IMO it is long overdue for other ISV's starting to use Microsoft Update on Windows. I don't know if it is Microsoft not allowing ISV's to hook into the system or if it is the ISV's that are unwilling to use Microsoft Update. Either way, it could be greatly improved.
* Using Synaptic in Ubuntu you can point-and-click to install software from a big catalogue.
* XP installation is a bit easier but also slower and more tedious considering the multiple reboots.
* Better performance for my WG511T Netgear card in windows. I wish Netgear would provide a native Linux driver of their own.
* The time needed to get at fully functional Ubuntu system was actually much less than the similar time needed to get an XP system up and running. This surprised me.

That is no typo!  180 viruses! I am working on my cousin's daughter's computer and that is how many she had!  It is by far and away the record for me.  I have never had anyone even begin to approach that number of viruses on a single computer!  And it is still not right!

In addition, it had over 1200 items of spy/ad Ware on it (I have heard worst stories on that as I am on a Resnet list).  And why am I working on it?  She complained she was getting "out of memory errors".  No duh!  I am surprised it even booted (barely. It took about 45 minutes to see the desktop, and longer to get into any application).

I am in the process of finishing the installation, but I am going to call my cousin and ask for the restore CD.  I will recover files they have, but I would not feel right giving this back to him as Windows is severly cripled.

180 viruses!  Amazing!

A question that I often ask myself. I didn't seem to meet any female computer/games geek out there so I'm asking does she/them exist in the real world or only she/they are only a fantasy. For example when my coworker got a new computer (P4 2.4 Ghz, 1024 MB memory) I asked her if it's faster then the old one (P3 600 Mhz, 256 MB memory) she replied: "I didn't notice any difference". The second example is I just started with playing the new Heroes of Might and Magic V and when I asked another my friend what she thinks about it when she was watching me playing it she said: "Colors are nice". How about this example. Another coworker got an OS upgrade from win2000 to winXP and she didn't even notice that I upgraded her OS?!

OK I admit those examples are a 'bit' extreme but it made me thinking about females and computers. Is it that computers are made by male for male that there are a lot more male computer geeks out there or is it just that generally females are not that attracted by technology. Shouldn't someone make computers and games that would appeal more to female users.

Please if they are any female computer geeks out there reply to this article just that I will know that female computer geeks exist in the real world as well and not just in my fantasies. Also can you write what kind of computers and games do you like. Me for example like laptops with big screens 17"-20" and good speakers. The most I like playing turn-based strategies (Civilization and Heroes of Might & Magic) and Sci-Fi RPGs (Star Wars: Knights of Old Republic) and NBA Live series.

Comments much appreciated.

Hardware dies.  It's a fact of life that at some point, your beloved gizmo will give up the ghost and go off to that great big CompUSA in the sky to forever rest comfortably in cushioned boxes with all of its fallen comrades.  Some hardware lasts longer than others, as is evidenced by the Macintosh Powerbook (original) that still runs weather data tools in my dad's lab.  Some hardware however has a short lifespan and can sputter and die sooner than one would expect, and typically just a day or two after the warranty expires.

When the latter happens, we grow frustrated, and even though we may be a day or two past that magical 90 day timeframe, we still try and call tech support.  However, for the past several years, it's been very common to encounter a know-nothing tech support worker in India when calling for help in bringing back to life that card, drive, monitor etc that you shelled out hundreds of dollars for and feel should have lasted perhaps a bit longer than three months.  Now from time to time you'll be (un)lucky and the equipment will die before the warranty expires.  Unfortunately, that does not make the support experience any more bearable as you'll struggle to get your far off friend to understand even the most rudimentary description of your problem.  It only gets worse if you actually KNOW what's wrong and needs to be fixed since you'll still be forced to go through the inane checklist of common problems that tier 1 support is required to go through before transferring you to someone who actually has a clue.  Yes, I have tried rebooting, cycling the power, reseating all the connections, sacrificed the chicken, spun around three times and spit over my shoulder... I work in IT, this is all SOP to me, THE DAMN THING IS BROKEN NOW FIX IT! 

So it was with the dark memories of dealing with support lines from Dell, Gateway, HP, and any cable company I've ever had, that I took to assess my recent situation...

My video card was dying.

In March, I bought an eVGA GeForce 7800GS OC 256MB AGP card from Newegg.com to coincide with the release of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (I also picked up an extra two gigs of RAM... I wanted to make sure the game ran as good as it could on my system).  It's a phenomenal card and performs as well as I can possibly expect any AGP card to.  It's essentially the top line card I can get for my aging AGP based system.  So, for five months I was in relative gaming bliss as I was able to get some of the best graphics out of all the latest games and all was good with the world.  Then, shortly after moving to Michigan last month, things started to go awry.  I noticed weird "stuck" pixels on my monitor when playing any 3D game.  This was strange because I have an old CRT monitor and those don't get stuck pixels.  But it was very consistent with which pixels were fried so at first I thought it was my monitor, but no tests I ran showed any issues, and I saw the same problems with my spare LCD monitor.  Additionally, I was seeing odd geometry drawing issues where polygons would have one vertex suddenly stretch off into the distance, and strange colored splotches appeared on more complex textured surfaces.  This brought me to the remaining possible culprit, my video card.

I've had video cards die on me in the past, fans went out, the ability for the card to draw enough power went away etc.  However, my cards typically tend to last a year or two before shuffling off their mortal coil.  I ran power tests to make sure all my rails were pushing the right amount, and that came clean.  I even went so far as to toss in my aging ATI 9800XT 256MB card I had sitting in a box to make sure it wasn't a board or power issue.  That card worked like a charm (though MUCH slower in new games since it's so old).  Now, with my options exhausted, it was time to face the music, pay the piper, bite the bullet, confront my demons and.... CALL SUPPORT!

The dread and fear were palpable, it was like a thick fog that clung all around me, ethereal and slimy all at the same time.  Would it just be easier to go out and buy a completely new card, forsaking this one?  Surely the frustration and agony of dealing with phone support wasn't worth $300.  Well, I don't have any cash at the moment, so I had to suck it up and pick up the phone.

So, since I bought the part through a reseller, I had to call the manufacturer, eVGA.

I call... press my way through the automated option system until I reach the "speak to a goddamn human" option and get into the hold queue.

And wait...

About a minute.  Wow, that was fast.  A cheerful voice greets me in a perfectly normal and understandable accent.  This guy is a native English speaker!  Oh dear sweet lord, surely I have somehow died while waiting on hold and passed on to heaven, this being but part of my eternal reward for endlessly enduring the stupidity of users and the rivaling stupidity of outsourced tech support.  I check my pulse, pinch my arm and determine that I am in fact still alive, my time to pass from this realm had not yet come... and that meant that I had actually gotten a real English-speaking support rep on the line after virtually no wait on hold.

For the sake of this article, lets say the rep's name is John (I don't remember what it was, I didn't think to write it down at the time) and he was very polite, cheerful, and responsive.  He asked me if I had registered my video card on the eVGA website.  I had.  He then asked for a description of my issues, which I supplied.  Then came the question I was dreading the most "When did you buy your card and from who?"  to which I said "March" fearing for the standard 90 day warranty to bite me in the arse.  Nope, no problem, he informs me that eVGA cards have lifetime warranties.  If the card dies for any reason short of being the result of stupid human tricks, eVGA will replace the card no problem.  Only catch is, they don't cross-ship, meaning I have to ship my card to them before they'll process it and send me a replacement.  This means I'd have to be without my beloved 3D card for a full week or so... of course it's not like it was giving me much performance at this point anyway with the rainbow colored randomly expanding polygons in most of my games.  So I send in an RMA request, a day later it's approved and I ship my card off to eVGA in California.

And a week later, the replacement card lands on my desk, all packed up in a nice little plastic protective bubble.  It's a newer build of my same card so hopefully the old issues won't come back.  I get the card home, plug it in, and I'm getting performance in games I haven't seen for several months!  Implying that the card had been on a steady decline for quite some time now.  I've had the card in my system now for a day and I'm back up to speed playing all my favorite games, and even loaded the Battlefield 2142 beta which is running without a glitch!

Despite the card dieing so soon after purchase, which I'm given to believe is an anomalous glitch, the support from eVGA was so responsive, and easy to understand (yay English!), coupled with the lifetime replacement policy, eVGA has won my graphics card business for a long time to come.  This is especially good for them considering I am building out a new system come next spring and will be considering going SLI and PCIe.  I will recommend them to anyone who asks for a good reliable card manufacturer.

I can’t understand it. Why is Macintosh so disliked by so many? I used to use the Mac a couple of years ago at one of my jobs. The boss liked Macs and only bought Macintosh. As a PC user at the time and having never used the Mac, I didn’t really feel intimidated by it.

It took me a couple of days to get the hang of it and I actually liked it! There was no big deal to it. After having used it for over three years (my time at that position) I actually loved it!

At my next position it was back to PCs again. Once again, it was no problem to get back with the flow of using it.

I came across some comments recently on a blog site and I can’t believe how much the each person either really hated or really loved Macintosh. I mean the things those people wrote, they got personal!

Is it really that serious? Can’t there just be some people who really, really love the Mac and some really, really love the PC? You know what? I blame that commercial that’s on right now. It’s their fault there’s all this ‘be hating’ around now. That or it just picked at a boil that was always under the surface and have opened up a really ripe wound!

These are some of the comments I read on the NY Times. It was an article that wasn’t even so much about PCs or Macs it was a totally different topic. I won’t post the article itself since it had nothing to do with what I’m talking about here, although it (the article) was interesting, that is for another blog at another time.


__________________-

“Mac users always fail to realize how few they are. It is a pain and expensive to create a parallel system for so few people. Don’t believe the product placement in movies, only 6% of our website’s visitors for example come from mac users (almost 3% use lineux for comaprison).
It would be like demanding MTV translate its site into spanish NOW, but at least there are a lot of people who speak Spanish.
You wanted an expensive white computer, and now you have it. Just don’t expect the rest of the world to jump.
Andrew
www.boomchicago.nl
— Posted by Andrew Moskos”





“macs suck
— Posted by Dom”




“Macs have an influential presence online which makes that 4% feels like 75%.
lonelygirl15 sounds like a show already.
— Posted by Ajit”


“# 1: Trying to mock Mac users by pointing out how few of them there are doesn’t work. In fact, that’s the key to Apple’s cult-like appeal. If everyone really started buying Macs, hardcore Mac users would be emotionally devastated. And if there are so few of them, why waste your breath baiting them, anyway?
— Posted by ted”



“Ted,
As a Mac user, I have to admit you’re right. If everyone’s computers ran an operating system as intuitive, beautiful, and straightforward as OS X, I’d be seriously upset at having lost my elite status.
Now if only we can get Microsoft to redesign the iPod, maybe I’ll switch back.
— Posted by Nick vdK”

“Mac users are very influential, much bigger than whatg they represent online. Only a single digit porcentage of people using Macs (4%) does not mean they are not important or influential. As an example, 45% of Wired Magazine users, a magazine read by influential people interested on advances in technology, life and culture, are Mac users (by the way, Jews are 0.5% of the world population but they account for more than 20% of Noble prizes).
— Posted by Max
“Andrew Moskos” is only partly right: Mac users are numerically a minority, but like “Ajit” notes, we have a disproportionate influence on the culture. We cluster into info. and other related media jobs, which control the mental world of all you PC hacks. Kind of like gay people. Oh, yes, I remember, the word is “elites”: few but strong!
— Posted by Tdawwg”



“August 3rd,
2006
4:36 pm
Mac Users may only be 6% on your site, but we are also better educated, make and spend more money and dominate the artistic and media-driven world. Once you go Mac you never go back.
— Posted by Mark Flora”

No, not the machines.  I still think they are over priced.  But their service.  We made another 2 trips out there yesterday (to the Apple Store).  But now I know how to make a reservation before going.

The first trip (and the second) was for my Son's iPod.  For some reason it wiped all his songs and then would not let him re-add them.  So we took it in and I let him do all the talking.  And the tech wiped it (the songs are still on the computer) and we went home.  And all seemed to be well.  But at about the same point of adding songs as before, it wiped them again! 

Ok, so I dont know iPods.  but I do know computers.  And this is a problem with the computer, not the software.  But what?  Like I know?  So we went out again.  And again I let my son do the talking (he will make a good tech one day as he had the exact error message written down).  So the (new one this time) clerk says "What is the problem?".  My son starts to explain and then he starts to say "Ok, we will reformat the iPod and....." and I cut him off with a wave of my hand and pointed to my son.  Who then went on to give him the Paul Harvey version - i.e. the rest of the story (as in it did it twice).

Zip, bing, and 10 minutes later, we walked out with a new unit.  No ifs ands or complaints!  Now that impressed me!  So far (and this is 24 hours later), all seems to be well with his iPod.  And I am impressed with their expertise and (somewhat) with their service.  As long as you have a reservation, you can get excellant service and competant service.

Now that I know how to do that on line, it is not so bad.  And the help cant be beat.

On a side note, not related to my travails, I did see them help a Mac customer.  When the "Genius" (that is what they are called, it is not a snide remark) could not help her as it was a problem with 3rd party software, they found another "Genius" that had experience with that package.  It was obvious the user was clueless (and probably a PEBKAC error) but they never were condescending or nasty.  Always professional.

I may not be buying a Mac soon (I figure in about a year), I am buying stock.  I am impressed!

I wanted to take this moment and share some of the skins that have caught my eye in the last few weeks or so. I will try to keep this going every week.

Windowblinds

Eminence by rjsmith2007

A dark skin is something that is sometimes hard to pull off, but I think
Eminence has done it very well. Now I can have another dark WB on my computer
without the word Vista in it.

Eminence





Noctilucent by Fuzzy Logic

A simple and clean skin with lots of color choices. What more could anyone
ask for?

Noctilucent






Neutronium by I.R. Brainiac

I don't know what to say.  It's just a very cool skin.

Neutronium






CursorXP

Red Flame by TYCUS

A great cursor that will go with many WB skins.

Red Flame






DesktopX Widgets

Clear Weather No. 2 by Richard Mohler

I have always been a fan of the "clear" series by Richard Mohler.  This is
just another great addition with other one's in his gallery.

Clear Weather No. 2





Rabid-MP3 by rabidrobot

One of the best MP3 players I have seen in a while.  Be sure to download this
one.

Rabid-MP3




There are many more skins by these and many other
artists here on Wincustomize.  These are just a few I wanted to share with the
rest of you.  Please add your suggestions to this thead for some other great skins
you have seen lately.

Be sure to check out the Wincustomize Gallery for more great skins.

I don't usually blog about computer related topics.  My hubby does more than enough of that for the both of us   I felt compelled to write about Natural Desktop though.

I am one of those people who can't function when there is silence.  I usually have the radio or TV going in the background when others aren't up and about making noise.  Last week my boys had left Natural Desktop running on their computer and I heard wonderful sounds of birds chirping when I got up in the morning.  I enjoyed it so much I didn't bother turning the radio on.

Throughout the day and night Natural Desktop changes sounds according to the animal noises and local weather.  The other night there was a forecast for scattered thunderstorms so I got to enjoy the sounds of the rumbling of thunder and the pitter-patter of rain.  I love it!  I highly recommend it too!!

Microsoft has released the public betas for Vista and Office 2007.

You can download Office 2007 here - http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/download/en/default.mspx

Vista download will be available soon here - http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/get_it.mspx