Heaven is where:
The police are British
The chefs are Italian
The mechanics are German
The lovers are French
and it’s all organized by the Swiss
Hell is where:
The police are German
The chefs are British
The mechanics are French
The lovers are Swiss
and it’s all organized by the Italians
This week I decided to give my “old” desktop to my son. He loves gaming. He has an Xbox 360 and a PlayStation 3 and a PlayStation 4. (And a Wii if that counts.) Of course, he has now, in due course, had decided that PC gaming is what he wants to do now. The old desktop was just sitting there turned off most of the time. Basically a backup if/when my laptop didn’t work. Or, more likely, when I did something that made my laptop not work.
He has a Dell Inspiron 5000 series but, of course, with the Intel HD4400 graphics he wasn’t going to get far using that. Mindcraft didn’t like it very much. I hate to think what H1Z1 would play like.
Anyway, my old desktop was (is?) an Intel i5-3450 CPU @ 3.10GHz. That is the one that has four core but no hyperthreading. It has 8 GB dual channel Corsair RAM and a 500 GB WD Blue hard drive. The only thing that it was missing was a decent video card.
My son bought using money he had saved up an EVGA GeForce GTX 750 1GB card. That is the one without the “Ti.” From what I read the extra money for the Ti was not worth it.
Since the desktop was formerly “mine” it had Windows 7 and Linux Mint installed. Both were old installations with many programs installed, uninstalled, etc. Clearly a fresh install of Windows 7 was called for.
I am used to installing Linux. In fact, in getting my new Lenovo Y50 set up with Mint I installed it more than a few times (thank you Secure Boot – and me not reading everything). It was annoying but since it only took about 7-8 minutes to install Mint it was no big deal.
Installing Windows 7 was something else. I started at 7:00PM by inserting the DVD and rebooting. (Yes, I should have copied the image to a USB key but I didn’t think about that until writing this – I don’t usually install Windows 7). Actually, the installation was on an original WD Raptor 36GB 10,000RPM SATA drive. That was, and still is, a really fast mechanical drive. What I didn’t realize is that Windows and the nVidia driver software would eventually take up 32GB. More on that later.
Anyway, once the installation was complete the next step is, of course, to install the patches. With Mint installing the patches is easy: “yum update; yum dist-upgrade” and two or three minutes later you are all up to day.
With Windows it was run Windows Update; wait seemingly forever for Windows Update to (a) find out what needed to be downloaded, (b) to download the patches and (c) to actually install the patches. And the, of course, reboot. (I have BellAliant FibreOp 3.0 which gives me 150 Mbit/s download.
By 10:30 it seems I must have downloaded more than 1 GB of patches. I was tired so I ran Windows Update again and went to bed.
When I got up in the morning I checked the machine and more patches had come down and needed to be installed. Thankfully, for now, that was the last of it – for now.
In short, unlike a Windows 7 install, I was shocked by the number of patches that had to be installed. Especially by the fact that I apparently had to (a) install a slew of patches before (b) getting the new version of Windows Update that would allow me to install SP1. Maybe I should have looked into downloading SP1 separately which may have saved me a bunch of time downloading, installing and rebooting. But I didn’t think about that since when I use apt-get it gets me updated right away.
Back to the 36GB Raptor drive: Obviously there was no space for much more than swap left on that drive so it had to go. I replaced it with a 500GB WD Blue drive I had left over from upgrading one of my NASes. The nice thing is that WD provides Acronis True Image WD Edition Software so transferring my many hours of installing Windows 7 was simply install True Image and run it. Easy, peasy.
Wonderful tweet graph of “Je suis Charlie” at http://srogers.cartodb.com/viz/123be814-96bb-11e4-aec1-0e9d821ea90d/embed_map
Not to ridicule those who feel that radio frequency (RF) energy is affecting them as there likely is something going on but it isn’t RF (see the citations in the Wikipedia article Electromagnetic hypersensitivity) I found the following supposed incidents:
In the UK a few years ago. The residents in a rural area started complaining that a new cellphone tower was giving them headaches, etc. A public hearing was held with engineers from the phone company responsible for the tower present. After an hour or so of people listing the ailments they’d been suffering since the tower went up, one of the engineers stood up and said “That all sounds terrible. But I have to admit I’m going to be curious to see what happens when we actually connect it and turn it on.”
Here is another one:
We had an interesting incident near Humboldt State University. A new cell tower went up and the local newspaper asked a number of people what they thought of it. Some said they noticed their cell phone reception was better. Some said they noticed the tower was affecting their health. To paraphrase the bottom line: “think about how much more pronounced these effects will be once the tower is actually operational.”
I read this on BBCNews.com on December 30 which the BBC found in the Daily Mirror:
Dead passengers on British Airways flights used to be given sunglasses, a vodka and tonic and a copy of the Daily Mail to disguise them from other passengers.
Just in case someone else has the issue of the menus not showing up in Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon and VMware Workstation 10.0.4. Simple problem: The only menu item that shows up is File. The rest are there if you click on File and drag the mouse to the right but you cannot, it seemed to me, to be able to click where you think the menu item should be.
Anyway, I found the solution in the VMware Communities site in post https://communities.vmware.com/thread/414748. The issue is according to the post is that Workstation’s /usr/bin/vmware-xdg-detect-de detects GNOME but there are some packages missing. The solution is to install the extra packages (large) via:
apt-get install mint-meta-mate mint-meta-cinnamon
Seems that digging a little further that my problem may be solved by enabling the “Disable touchpad while typing” option.
Hopefully it works!
Dell XPS 15 L501X
After over four years my Dell XPS 15 laptop (L501X) had gotten a little long in the tooth. The video card – an nVidia GT350M – is only slightly faster, by the narrowest of margins, than the Intel® HD Graphics 4400 in my son’s Dell Inspiron 15 5000. The Intel
I7-740QM compared to the i5-4210U is, outside of the number of threads (4 v. 2), is about the same horsepower and a uses a heck of a lot more power. And the XPS is heavy.
What I was looking for is:
XPS 15 Touch Screen
I first looked at the current Dell XPS 15 however as nice as it is it is very expensive (about CDN$2,000). And it has a touch screen which, outside of a true tablet, I find slightly pointless. At least until my arms grow another 20 or so centimetres.
Alienware 14
The Alienware 14 had the right specifications but is a little heavy. It is a gaming machine but I was willing to live with that – it would not be much heavier than the old XPS 15 with the 9-cell battery.
And then Dell dropped the Alienware 14 and replaced it with the Alienware 13. The screen reduction did not impress me too much – I would be going from a 15 inch to a 14 inch screen as it was but I could likely live with it. I do okay with my 10 inch Asus TF300T tablet. But the dropping of a quad-core processor killed it for me. I need the multiple cores for running multiple VMs.
So, my search as on, again.
Lenovo Y50
After another six months of searching I found the Lenovo Y50-70. The reviews on the display are somewhat true. It is not a great display. It is better than the screen on my XPS 15 though so I can live with it.
It did not come with a DVD player but that seems to be standard course now. I picked one up for $60.00. I don’t know what it is for having the numeric keypad. It takes up room that could be better used for the arrow keys or other function keys. I don’t even use the numeric keyboard on my desktop machines – at home or at work. I do find that the USB3 ports work faster than those on my XPS 15. But, then again, USB was it its early stages back then. And it comes with Windows 8.1. 8.1 is a nice try but Microsoft needs to get Windows 10 right. Anyway, with $500 off, the Y50-70 was mine. It is a nice set up for only $1,000: i7-4710HQ (quad-core) 2.5GHz; 16GB RAM, nVidia GTX860m with 4GB VRAM (not sure why anyone needs 4GB unless you are driving external monitors) and a 1TB/8GB SSD WD drive. I’m not sold on that hard drive yet. My old 500GB 7,200 RPM drive seems to have more, err… zip. Maybe I will get a 500GB SSD drive.
Oh, and the machine is light relative to the old XPS 15.
Anyone who has read my blog knows that I love Linux and run Linux as my day-to-day OS at home. My current favourite distribution is Linux Mint Cinnamon-edition.
This would be my first experience installing Linux on a UEFI system. Again, I am glad that I am a little late to the game with UEFI. My past reads have shown that this was a horror story.
Here’s what I have learned:
Anyway, that is enough typing for now. I will update the blog on what I find in the future.
