Nov 23
I was curious how much an xbox 360 would go for on ebay (link will be dead after a couple of days) and I looked last night. There were many auctions that were just ending that must have been 24 hour auctions that people had put up when they got home the night before after [...] [...more]
Posted: under Hardware, Technology.
I was curious how much an xbox 360 would go for on ebay (link will be dead after a couple of days) and I looked last night. There were many auctions that were just ending that must have been 24 hour auctions that people had put up when they got home the night before after it came out. The first one I clicked on went for $905….it sold in the store for $299 + $60 for the game that was also in the auction…nice profit. MS has said that they purposefully are restricting supplies so that it sells out everywhere…
(The auction didn’t mention a HD, so I’m assuming it was the cheaper $299 system and not the $399 one….either way though…)
Jul 22
Our laptop (Milenka wanted to make sure I referred to it as ours and not mine) decided to die the other day. It would freeze up during boot. The “last known good configuration” did nothing for me and it wouldn’t even go into safe mode. Doing a “repair” from the windows cd resulted in a [...] [...more]
Posted: under General, Hardware, Software.
Our laptop (Milenka wanted to make sure I referred to it as ours and not mine) decided to die the other day. It would freeze up during boot. The “last known good configuration” did nothing for me and it wouldn’t even go into safe mode. Doing a “repair” from the windows cd resulted in a blue screen every time I tried it…
After playing a bit and finding that out, I decided that reinstalling was going to be the only way I’d be able to get it to work. Of course, before I did that, I really wanted to backup some stuff. I usually don’t backup stuff on the laptop (because I’m lazy). Lucky me, I’d even been meaning to do it for a couple of weeks but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Whoops.
I downloaded the latest version of Knoppix (a version of linux that can be run entirely off a CD) and though I’d just transfer the files via samba. It was a nice idea anyways. I couldn’t get the shares to work properly when bother computers were running windows. The computers would see each other, but the connection would time out before they could actually communicate anything most of the time. I had figured it was because the laptop was so slow in general (Not helped by the fact that the processor wants to run in it’s slow mode regardless of what I do to make it do otherwise). When smbclient timed out as well I knew that wasn’t the case.
I tried various things to try to get it to work right and even briefly entertained the idea of just setting up an ftp server and transferring the files that way (it probably would have been easier really….). In the end though, I was able to fix the problem. I found that by deleting HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer \RemoteComputer\NameSpace\{D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF} from the registry everything would run fast enough to actually use. Deleting that key disables the task scheduler over the network. Once I had that figured out, making my backup was a snap.
The fun wasn’t over just there though. Next, I reinstalled windows. This was all happy and fine and whatnot until I came up to part where it wants the cd key. Dell put this nice little holographic sticker on it with the words “Windows XP Home Edition” followed by “Product key:” and then some numbers. I’m not sure why they bothered since the number isn’t valid. I’ve reinstalled windows on this computer once before. I didn’t have any trouble that time around, but I think that I had just extracted the key from windows and not used the one on the bottom of the laptop. I was able to finish the installation using the key from my other computer, but of course I can’t actually activate it using that key.
I have two options here. My first option is to get a crack so I can just use windows as is. Unfortunately, if I do that, I won’t be able to get updates, or at least not easily. Given that and the fact that it is an actual legit copy of windows and I shouldn’t have to put up with their DRM crap, I’ll probably go with my second option. That is, to call up MS, explain the situation, and make them give me a key that will work all happy like. I guess I can report Dell for piracy while I’m at it… 
It has actually occurred to me that there is a third option as well. I know the laptop isn’t 100% right and the way it’s been behaving, I think it may have a hardware problem that’s causing all of this. Milenka doesn’t even want to use it anymore. I had originally dismissed putting linux on it because the 802.11b card won’t work, but as I looked into it in more detail, it looks like with some playing I might be able to get it to work. Given all that, I might just put linux on it instead.
