Jul 15 2010

Thursday Tech Support

So I’ve spent the last week in a dual Ubuntu/XP environment and while I haven’t succeeded in improving either one of them very much I’ve at least been able to alleviate my load time problem with Yahoo News.

Of course now my YouTubes won’t play, so it’s all a compromise.

And I hate, hate, hate the keyboard translations that make my numeric keypad useless for selecting and transferring text (Ctrl-Insert, Shift-Insert, Shift all directions to select text).  Works fine off the extra keys and their teeny tiny carpal tunnel inducing foot print.

Not able to get that scroll wheel desktop switch thing working again in this version either which slows me down some, though for viewing (not composing) it’s still an incredibly efficient environment.

I’m also not having much luck getting DOSBox to load my old tired games like Scorched Earth, or AVG to do scans of my NTFS Windows drives.  I’m itching for a clean lean install of XP to see if that solves some of my issues on that side, but I’m waiting for a 32 Gb USB drive as a platform and yet maybe I’m foolish to do that.

You see I’ve always had a hankering to run a superfast development system in RAM.  Take 10k lines of code and see how fast you can get a native executable.  Now I have unimaginable amounts of RAM just on my Video Card, but I’ve never been able to set up a development system that worked as well as my CCPM-86/Desqview dual boot on my 286-12.

What I do to amuse myself instead is speed install OSs and I had thought that a Flash Drive installation would be noticeably faster than a straight SATA or 133  or even one of my notoriously unreliable RAID setups.  What causes me to question my assumptions is the availability of this part which provides the secondary benefit I desire- being able to boot from an independent drive so you can virus check and fix configuration problems (Trendnet Easy Go?  Don’t install that.).

I also take ‘normal’ questions.

rustymancuso581

7 comments

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    1. I always start from scratch.

      New Ubuntu?  Fresh download and burn of 10.4 A-64 on a blank 80 Gb SATA.  1 CD, 1 HD, Motherboard, RAM, and Power Supply.

      Other stuff (drives) plugged in after all updates.

      The same on XP installs.

      This is not as bad as when 8.04 wouldn’t recognize my video card.

      1. This weekend for instance I’m transportation limited.

  2. as a normal question?

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