Hello Jessie
Upgraded from Wheezy to Jessie earlier and decided to give Cinnamon another look. Last I looked it had a lot of growing up to do. Well, it’s matured quite a bit, and so far I really like what I’m seeing!
Category: Computing & Internet
A Note For Pinterest
* A Note For Pinterest*
Pinterest Just a quick note of no thanks. You were kind enough to suspend my wife’s account. No email explaining why, she just couldn’t log in anymore. She is fairly old school and has previously had no use for computers, smart phones etc. But when I got her a new smart phone she somehow stumbled upon pinterest and took a liking to it. I was pleased that she was finally getting into something that would acclimate her to her new phone and possibly PCs.at some point.
I was a bit surprised when I returned from work today and she was complaining that she couldn’t get logged onto to pinterest. After checking her phone out I found that her account was suspended for no apparent reason. I checked her email, nothing. Went to their support site, and submitted a ticket. Haven’t heard nothing yet.
She’s pretty upset about it, so am I.
Kicking the tires on Windows 7
The other day I bought a copy of Windows 7 Pro for the PC I’m piecing together. After I got it, I thought how nice it would be to at least be familiar with the OS when I hit the power switch on the new PC for the 1st time. Then I got to thinking about how much I dislike Vista on my laptop. After a quick compatibility check I decided to take it for a spin to see what I thought of it.
I wanted to do a clean install, I don’t care for OS upgrades, most leave too many fragments laying around. So I moved any important files to my desktop PC, slipped in the new shiny Win 7 DVD and rebooted. After selecting the language, keyboard and locale options the installer took me to the 2nd screen to choose the partition I wanted to install the OS to. I still had the software backup partition with Vista and original software on the drive… This is a new OS, I won’t be need that, delete. OK now there is unused space, so I’ll just delete the main partition as well and create a new one. Delete, confirm, New, size, Apply. Then a window pops up saying that Windows may create additional partitions for system files, choices are OK or Cancel. I don’t want to cancel but it’s not OK either! After doing some digging I found if you accept creating the partition at install time it is fairly difficult to remove. I don’t know if that is true because I also found that to avoid the extra partition from being created the drive must be partitioned before beginning installation. To do this from the Win 7 DVD, boot from the DVD and at the language, keyboard and locale selection screen hit SHIFT + F10 keys to bring up a command prompt. From the command prompt you can run diskpart to create a partition on you drive, you will need to partition all the space on your drive or Windows will still create the unwanted partition in the unallocated space.
The rest of the installation went along flawlessly, without so much as a hiccup.
One thing I found after the installation was complete was that at the logon screen numlock was always off. After logon your previous state was restored. I love the keypad and my password contains numeric characters so this won’t fly. I did some browsing and seen that Shawn, a support engineer for Microsoft, claims that the numlock state before logon is a BIOS setting and not a Windows feature. Unacceptable answer, sorry Shawn. By default Windows 7 boots with numlock state from the BIOS setting. However if your BIOS does not have numlock state as an option Windows defaults to numlock off at boot time. But it can be changed with a couple quick edits to the registry… It must be one of those undocumented features Microsoft loves, right Shawn? OK, so let’s document this in case someone else might want to do this too. The keys that need to be modified are:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Keyboard\InitialKeyboardIndicators
HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Control Panel\Keyboard\InitialKeyboardIndicators
You will also need to change the Key for each unique user ID number in the HKEY_USERS hive.
HKEY_USERS\{your unique user id number}\Control Panel\Keyboard\InitialKeyboardIndicators
The best way to find all keys is to open regedit under an adminstrator account and find each occurance of InitialKeyboardIndicators key.
You will need to assign the value of 2 to each of the above keys. This will set numlock state to on at boot time. Below is the complete list of options if you would also like to set your caplocks and scrollock state as well.
0 – Turn all indicators Off (NumLock, CapsLock, ScrollLock)
1 – Turn CapsLock On
2 – Turn NumLock On
3 – Turn CapsLock and NumLock On
4 – Turn ScrollLock On
5 – Turn CapsLock and ScrollLock On
6 – Turn NumLock and ScrollLock On
7 – Turn all indicators On (NumLock, CapsLock, ScrollLock)
After fixing that I reinstalled all my other software and changed various settings to my liking. I did have to set a couple older programs to run in compatibility mode, but everything went well.
My first impression of Windows 7 is a very good one. User Access Control is much less intrusive than in Vista and can be adjusted depending on how often you would like to be interrupted by it. I also must say that setting up a home network with XP on my desktop PC was much simpler than it was in Vista. The quicklaunch bar is gone (although you can get it back) instead you can pin items directly to the taskbar or start menu easily. The jury is still out on my opinion 7’s use of libraries, I can see where it could be useful, I’m just not used to it yet.
I will keep XP on my old desktop, it’s old enough that I can’t justify putting 7 on it. But after the test drive I’ve decided to keep 7 on the laptop and I’ll have to get another copy for the new PC, so I’ll be playing with 7 for quite some time. I’ll jot down some notes here if I find some things about it that can’t be easily found elsewhere on the net.
Building a new PC…Finally
I’ve been playing with computers now for quite a while. I started with an Atari 1200XL, which may give you some sort of time reference. Then moved up to a PC, with DOS 6.0 & Windows 3.1. Updated to one with Win98 and got into Linux, upgraded to Win 2k PRO. Updated to XP. Still dual booting Linux, it’s a lot of fun! Then got a laptop with Vista…The laptop is good, Vista – not so much.
Anyhow, I’ve been wanting to piece together a PC since my days with Win98, I just never got around to it.
Well now’s a good time as any. So I scoured the hardware reviews & buyers opinions and came up with a system that should last me a while… See above, I don’t update too often! Here’s what I came up with:
For the case I’m planning to stuff everything into a Corsair Graphite 600T. I guess I shouldn’t say “stuff everything into”, for a mid tower case it’s fairly large, especially compared to the one I have now. I was looking for a case that I wouldn’t have problems fitting today’s larger video cards into and still keep good air flow around it. I’ve looked at this case at MicroCenter, and I’m happy with my decision on it.
Speaking of video cards, I’m putting a 2 Gb XFX – Radeon 6950 in it. It’s not cutting edge, but I’m not a huge gamer, so it should easily handle my needs.
I’m going to rely on the i7 2600k to do the number crunching. Worked out pretty well for me, after the sales were halted on the 1155 motherboards, I got a good price on the CPU.
To cool that puppy down, I’m putting a Corsair Hydro H70 on it.
I don’t have the motherboard yet. I’m glad I waited to get one since I didn’t know about the B2 stepping issue with the motherboard chipset. When they become available again I plan to use a MSI P67 GD65. I was going to use a Gigabyte board, but with the rest of my layout it would leave only 1 open SATA connection. The MSI option will leave me with three open connections to use so it would give me a little extra room to expand. I have heard the the MSI BIOS still has a few bugs, maybe they can get this worked out while they are waiting on the new chipsets.
As far as memory goes, gee I forgot…No, I plan to fill it up with G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3 1600, 4 Gb modules (total 16 Gb). I don’t overclock much so the 1600’s should be plenty fast enough.
Getting to storage, I’m going to install the OS on a Corsair 128 Gb SATAIII Solid State drive. Personal files and settings will be put on two 2 Tb Seagate Barracudas. These are 7200 RPM drives on SATAII connectors set up as RAID0.
The optical drive will be a Lite-on iHBS112, Blu-Ray burner.
I’m not a huge fan of onboard audio or surround sound, so I’m tossing in a M-AUDIO Audiophile 2496 sound card.
All this will be powered by a Cooler Master 1000W power supply.
Edit: After doing a little, OK quite a bit of reading on power supplies, I came across a site explaining typical power supply reviews. What I read made sense to me, so I did more looking into the power supply I had chosen and quickly decided that I wanted to look at other options. Instead of the one originally listed, I believe I going to install a Corsair AX 850 in my system.
After an unattended install of Win7 PRO 64 bit and a newer version of Office, and I should be good to go. It might not be the fastest thing on the planet, but should be OK for web browsing & email…hehe!
I haven’t looked into it much, but installing Windows and Linux on a single RAID array may not work too well. So I may need to throw another hard drive in it for Linux. Which is why I was looking to get more SATA connectors on the motherboard.
Look it over, if you see anything that don’t look right let me know.