Yesterday it was Wawa because I was up in my old neighborhood and Wawa has a much better selection of junk. So many nights, I sit with my cupcakes... cuz they... light up my life... yeah, I went there.
Hulu and CBS won't work with Windows XP so I can save $22 a month if I cancel or I can see if it will work with The Maharaja's laptop which he has set up in this room as a guest laptop. It is an older Dell, but it apparently still works. I just need to ask him to log off so I can log on.
It would probably be a blessing if Facebook doesn't work in this environment, though that is when I will want to access FB because, after all, put up a wall and I want to get around it. Besides, the babbler looks to the internet, including Facebook, for ideas and the stuff of nonsense that makes the babbler babbler. If all we have left are fattening foods, this will be a very unhealthy December.
I checked in on Harpo because he's been kind of down and the good news is a bunch of people stopped by his house this evening after hearing he was kind of down. It was apparently a spur of the moment thing after a few of them were heading home from somewhere. I thought about calling a few of them to do just that today but got wrapped up in working on this laptop and writing to myself and to Microsoft and to J and to the universe and the time just flew by.
I explored (and learned more) the Hiren Boot CD and opened a Linux environment to see what it might offer and it was a 2012 version of Linux with Firefox 16 which at least was made to be on the internet in a more modern era than Windows XP. I found there was a whole lot to learn in the Linux environment and in Firefox itself and I was not comfortable right off, but stuck with it for a couple of hours. I was able to set up two monitors, which was a big plus. The task bar was a pain though because it would only sit on the larger monitor at the bottom and it would disappear on the laptop monitor unless it was at the top because of the difference in sizes of the monitors. I could not upgrade Flash or anything in Firefox and found out that the four year old Firefox was as obsolete as the 20 year old XP on most video sites but I continued exploring.
The Maharaja got home (i was after 3am by then and I'd been at it for six or seven ours) and he asked about the Hiren Disk, which is his, and I realized I should make a copy and burn one of my own if I can - and also make a USB copy. I will work on that tomorrow. I copied the Hiren software from the Hiren website and then copied the USB Format software. I moved them over to my external hard drive and the 600+ MB Hiren moved fine, but the tiny USB format file created an error and then my external drive disappeared and I panicked, concerned I might have erased/reformatted the drive so I shut Linux down but it would not shut down properly. Then the laptop would not power up properly and all sorts of panic set in.
Several tries later and after getting into the BIOS with the F2 button to set the boot to first priority CD/DVD, it booted up the Hiren Boot and I chose to retun to familiar territory, the Mini-XP. I explored the fixes on the Boot Disk and found Victoria, rated a professional level hard drive evaluator and repairer and I started it running. This is a screen shot of one of the tests. In less than half a second (the 03:44:17 mark, 313ms into the test, there was already a warning - the boot sector that prevents the full loading of Windows, perhaps?
A bit over three minutes later the first hard error occurred followed quickly by another. I will take another screeshot as the test progresses. I have no clue whether this is repairable, but bythe 15% mark there were four hard errors and three block warnings. Sigh. This is gonna take a while.
As the test continues I am reading about it. It's pretty simple as the color codes tell the story. I am not trying to repair anything with this first scane, just testing. By about the 34% mark I am starting to make funeral arrangements. By the 35% mark I bought the coffin and the plot. By the 36% mark (below), I simply let the test run out of curiosity to see just how dead the drive can get and still almost boot abd be read through the Mini-XP. I'll be removing any that can be removed files tomorrow and use Mini-XP for now.
So the next stop is to see if I can boot Windows 7 or 10 from an external drive and bypass this drive completely (if I can find a copy of Win7 or Win10 that can be booted from an enternal drive) or I send this laptop to Dell with $149 and get a new Windows 7 machine or I ask Best Buy how much for the same service or I continue using Mini-XP and give up entertainment and go to the linrary for job searching with the sites that won't work in Mini-XP ot I buy a mini desktop and use the keyboard and monitors I already have and give up the portability or I buy a new laptop for cheap and deal with it's limitations or I buy a new laptop for $700-$1000 and cut 2-3 months off the life of the car and hope for a job before then.
I am going to send this entry into the cyberspace now and hope it reaches the blog world where it belongs. If dog years are seven human years, computer years are about twenty human years if we're lucky, probably more on average.
Love your computer, just not too much.
Narf :)
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