Officially Windows-free

Yep, you heard me, Windows-free. And what, you may ask, could the possible cause for this radical state of being?

I turned on my Toshiba laptop over the weekend (actually just to shut it off, as I saw it was sitting in sleep mode), and was immediately presented with a spybot message to the effect of ’something trying to change my registry settings, did I want to proceed?’ Of course not. After sending the pop-up on its way, I was presented with another. And another. And another. I checked the little ‘remember my response’ checkbox, and sat, open-mouthed, as the thing spat out pop-up after pop-up: ‘registry change denied’. I watched it for a few minutes before dragging my eyes away.

Well, that wasn’t the end of the world (though I’d be damned if I was going to connect it to the internet). It’d been years since I’d reformatted the beast, and to be honest, I’d been thinking about doing it for a while. I’ll just get my recovery discs and…

I couldn’t find them. Anywhere. They weren’t in any of my boxes of software. They weren’t floating around in the basement in another box. I found the recovery discs for the M30 that was stolen, but for the life of me, the M40 recovery discs had vanished.

Ah, well, s’ok. I’ll just, for the time being, install Windows 2000. I HAVE those discs. May as well use them, right? Oh. Not backwards compatible. I guess that makes sense. I’ll just reboot to DOS and…

Ah.

I’ll just google (on the mac) and see what other people do when they need to re-format their drive from WinXP…

Ah.

In the meantime, the pop-up ‘registry change denied’ boxes are flashing away on the screen…

I wound up downloading all 700 MB of Ubuntu on the mac, burning it to disc, and then updating the BIOS boot order to hit the DVD first.

Ubuntu installed like a dream, behaved itself, and looks awesome. I’ll probably have to dual boot when it comes time to try and get Spore to run on my machine, but for the time being I’m malware free. Yippee!

Lest you think that was the end of my computering woes, think again! I’ve also been having problems with my TimeMachine backup that I set up on an external HD. For the last week or so, whenever I plug it into the mac, it chugs and whirs, and the little TimeMachine logo spins around, displaying ‘preparing to backup’. Then nothing. It sits there, going round and round, for hours. Nothing happens, the status never changed from ‘preparing to backup’.

OK, I’ll just open the disk utility and suss things out from there. No luck. It takes an hour for the thing to actually detect the external drive (little spinny progress icon working away), and then errors when I try to either validate the disk or erase it altogether. Plugging it into Steve’s laptop doesn’t work, as Windows doesn’t even detect the drive.

Bada-bing, Ubuntu to the rescue! Even though I’ve never used Linux before in my life, after spending a few minutes on the Ubuntu forums, I’ve equipped myself with a few basic terminal commands, and hey presto, a Fat32 partitioned disk ready for action.

Plugged that into the mac, which prompted me to re-format it (finally!). And TimeMachine has never worked so well.

New Mac

Well, testing, testing, and all that jazz, cause I’m writing this on my new MacBook! Luckily, it only took a day or so to set up the wireless connectivity to the network (problems with the DNS settings, but they are all sorted now).

So far… well, the most I can say really is that it feels strange. Strange to be using a completely different OS for starters, but also interesting. Today I found downloadsquad, which has a whole lot of information on different applications, widgets and the rest, which was quite a big help to me, as I knew sort of what I wanted, but had no idea where to look.

Applications that, so far, seem quite cool and interesting include: MindNode, ecto (what I’m writing this with), CopyWrite, Scrivener, Journler, and photo drop. All very cool applications, though I’m really only just learning about them all. Which I decide to stick with will be another story.

Sim City Societies Crash Bug part 2

- That is still consistently the most searched for term to reach this blog, which just goes to show how many people are still encountering problems with the game. I’ve stopped playing it altogether. I’m really becoming more and more disillusioned with PC gaming (if the post below didn’t indicate it clearly enough), which seems to just cater to a small percentage of people with the high end equipment. Even my beloved Sims 2 has turned on me. Everything was running smoothly till I installed Bon Voyage, and now - even though I’ve uninstalled BV - I’m still having graphics issues. Maybe it’s the copy of FreeTime I just reviewed. It’s so frustrating.

Maybe the bitterness is just a sign that I need to upgrade. But then - there’s nothing really wrong with my computer, I can do everything else without any problems; it’s wireless, I can surf, write, manipulate photos, send and receive email, listen to music, watch movies… so why do I feel so dissatisfied with it these days?

Perhaps it’s symptomatic of the general state of consumerism these days. No, this isn’t meant to be a rant, but I really do find it hard to put the brakes on the endless, constant upgrading that seems to be expected of us, just to keep up with games, technology, our friends, what’s advertised on TV and the internet. I want to slow down my frenetic pace of buying, wanting. I don’t count myself as particularly materialistic, and yet at times some weird frenzy takes hold, and suddenly I’ve bought yet more books from Amazon, something from TradeMe - it’s all so fast, all you have to do it press a mouse button a couple of times and that’s it.

Lately, I’ve been considering getting a MacBook. In a way it would feel like starting over. No games. Just a clean, fresh start. But would it be, really? Or have I just deluded myself into thinking that spending more money is a way to start over again? Really, if you think about it, the best thing to buy would be a blank notebook. Clean white paper. No games. Now that would be a fresh start.

Speaking of fresh starts, I got up early this morning and went for a run around the park. Not a biggie by any stretch of the imagination, just 2kms, but it felt really good to be doing it. I wasn’t as tired as I thought I’d be either. Now it’s just a matter of staying enthused about it, I’m aiming for every morning for the rest of the week. If I can work up to a half hour run every morning during the week, plus some writing, I’ll be over the moon.