LeMU.waterbottle

A fear­ful thing hap­pened on Tues­day. Woke up, resume my desk­top from sleep, pre­pared to leave for classes, then noticed the the PC is off again.  It surely was not a power out­age, because then the com­puter would turn on when I pressed the power but­ton again…

This is one of the “oh shit” moment I really do not like to see.  Espe­cially not know­ing that I have to leave in 10 min­utes and can­not fix it until I get back.

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「生存戦略、しましょうか」

Not going into the details which I’m sure you’d heard about it more or less.  I’m here only to say: Thank you, wikipedia, for risk­ing your rep­u­ta­tion to stand up against the Evil that is breed­ing in the US Con­gress before it becomes too late.  You are not only fight­ing for your own sur­vival, but much of the whole Internet.

“If it’s not bro­ken, don’t fix it.”  That has been my rea­son for being a long term Inter­net Explorer user until.  Many peo­ple con­sider IE being incred­i­bly easy to exploit, which led to a “if you ain’t using Fire­fox, you ain’t cool” move­ment a few years back.  FF fans rave how much more cus­tomiza­tion their browser has, and how much “safer” than IE, blah blah.  The argu­ment was not con­vinc­ing enough for me to switch over.  Partly because Microsoft’s browser is still way more acces­si­ble, in both vir­tual and real world.  A few web­sites I used to fre­quent was noto­ri­ous enough to have con­tent avail­able only to IE core; and of course, places like libraries more than likely to have IE than FF.

That was few years ago, and now things changed.  Up to a point I was not happy about IE8’s per­for­mance, and Fire­fox 5.0 came out under a new skin that looks sus­pi­ciously sim­i­lar to Google Chrome.  I didn’t like Chrome too well because the browser is still in beta, and it was lack of refine­ment under its slicker appearance.

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Par­ents just got a new Acer Aspire and mov­ing the old eMa­chine to office.  The eMa­chine had Win­dows XP, and intu­itively, I thought  Win­dows 7 would have no prob­lem restor­ing the files and set­tings cre­ated using Win­dows XP’s built-in backup pro­gram.  Just like almost every other expec­ta­tion I have for the pro­gres­sion in the Win­dows oper­at­ing sys­tems, I was wrong, again, this time. 

Hail for Microsoft earn­ing another metal for screw­ing stuff up.  Of course, for every such screw up, there got to be a solu­tion.  The idea is: how much time do I have to waste search­ing before I find some­thing that is sup­posed to be obvious?

The frus­tra­tion did not just end here.  It then appeared that Acer had mas­tur­bated the hard drive by leav­ing an ugly 13GB recov­ery partition–undeletable under nor­mal method, com­pletely igno­rant of the fact that I have already made recov­ery disks with writable DVD.  By “undeletable” I meant that using nor­mal pro­ce­dure under Win­dows 7, which is by run­ning Disk Man­age­ment.  Appar­ently Acer, or some higher force of Evil, decided that I must be pro­tected from my own stu­pid­ity.  Yes, I agree that wip­ing the recov­ery par­ti­tion is extremely unwise with­out any sys­tem back up… but come on, any­body who has the abil­ity to look up how to start Disk Man­age­ment in Win­dows 7 has to have the abil­ity to under­stand the con­se­quences of their actions.

Finally, there is a solu­tion that does not (or not yet) involve using another OS.  This time the search time was well over 30 minutes.

How­ever, the logic comes back to: why the hell can I not eas­ily free the gigan­tic 13GB of space for a bet­ter use, when I already made the god damn recov­ery disks?

I have seen enough Fail from the man­u­fac­ture to the OS maker for the past two hours.  I cer­tainly do not want to deal with any of this kind of bull­crap when my new net­book ships in.

CLICK HERE»>http://campaign.live.jp/bing/«<CLICK HERE

update: There is no sus­pence involved.  The cam­paign is over and click the big gift box for your offi­cial moe-win7 girl~  too bad I’m still using Vista T.T

details:
http://www.japanator.com/bing-goes-moe-enlists-voice-actresses-to-search-for-you-12792.phtml
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2009–12-21/microsoft-bing-search-engine-enlists-japanese-voices

Good job, Microsoft, very good job.  Though I’ve heard the rumor say­ing Win­dows 7’s jp ver­sion has its exclu­sive perks, I never trou­bled myself con­firm­ing it… but this, my friend, is a vibe that just can­not be ignored.

Let’s see who are these women… Idolm@ster… don’t know much about that game, skip­ping… ?! Hat­sune Miku.… MAN VERSION?!???! wtf???

Any­way, good try, Microsoft.  Thanks for the inter­ested indi­vid­u­als all over the world work­ing together for the won­der­ful(?) gift MS promised us.  Hope­fully the “gift” is Vista com­pat­i­ble, lol.

UTSA sells Win­dows Vista Ulti­mate for $29–yes, not $329, but $029.  Although I got the vista update disk for my lap­top long time ago, I still decided to get my hand on this “ulti­mate” ver­sion of Microsoft’s sup­pos­edly “next-gen” oper­at­ing sys­tem.  Even though I have absolutely no need for fea­tures such as Bit­Locker Vista Ulti­mate has to offer, but oh well, it is just too cheap to let it go, lol.

For­got to men­tion, the update disk from HP (Vista Home Pre­mium) does not let me to upgrade–a clean install was required.  That was some­thing I had no wish of doing; Ulti­mate needed no exces­sive pro­ce­dures like that.  After prob­a­bly an hour and half the upgrade was com­pleted, very few soft­ware pre­sented com­pat­i­bil­ity issues that had to be uninstall/reinstall.  One of those is Avast Home; Vista, for var­i­ous true and rumored rea­sons, seem to be fine with­out an AV pro­gram, so I passed.

Open­ing up Win­dows Explorer and I saw the Dif­fer­ence.  Per-user folder is moved to a more promi­nently vis­i­ble loca­tion that needed a bit adap­ta­tion time.  It is hard to con­clude the change is for the bet­ter, but it cer­tainly is more logical–like My Pic­tures and other such fold­ers are no longer under My Doc­u­ments direc­tory.  The net­work­ing com­po­nents of XP are inte­grated into this Net­work and Shar­ing Cen­ter.  I do not see the point of doing it… really…

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