About a month ago, a few sectors went splodey on my hard drive, so I backed up all my data, figuring it was on its way out. Sure enough, when I got back from a recent trip, my PC was dead. The system had been running XP, and the 750GB HD had been divided into a small C: drive for the OS and programs, with the rest in a large data partition. What I've done so far is replace the hard drive with a 90GB OCZ Vertex 2 solid state drive and load it up with Win 7 Pro. OMG, what a difference!
For one thing, solid state drives are screaming fast. And, the Win 7 installer automatically detected and ran all my hardware. I haven't had to manually load a single driver. Oddly enough, a couple years ago, the NICs on the motherboard had stopped working reliably, and I switched to using a USB NIC to connect to the Internet. I had assumed that it was a hardware failure, because a fresh install of XP did not fix it. Well, Win 7 is running the NICs, and they're working perfectly. Go figure. I buy my computer stuff at NewEgg.com, and they sell OEM versions of Windows. As far as I can tell, the only difference between the OEM and retail versions, besides the price, is that with the OEM versions, any OS tech support is the responsibility of the PC's "builder" (i.e., me). So, for simply being my own tech support, my copy of Windows cost only $140 instead of $300. Next up is installing an external SATA drive for data and figuring out how to map the "My Documents" to it. I'm also intrigued by the concept of network storage and subnet file sharing. I have a bunch of IP addresses at my disposal, so I just give my handful of Internet connected devices their own IP addresses; I've never messed around with subnet interaction between machines. It looks like Win 7 machines play nice with other Win 7 machines with respect to sharing, so I've ordered another copy of Win 7 that I'll put on an old Dell Latitude D610 and park it down in the basement. I'll also see if I can migrate the post count script to the laptop, because it's currently running on my old web server, a noisy desktop PC running Win2000 that I bought back in 1999. I tried to get the script to run on the new iMac web server, but dealing with OSX's unixy innards is bloody fucking hell, and I'm just grateful that I was at least able to get Apache running. And finally, last night I successfully upgraded my HTC Desire to Android 2.2 using the installer HTC released specifically for US Cellular's version of the phone. It has a WiFi tethering feature that had previously only been available to rooted phones, and I'm pretty sure I could have easily bricked my phone if I'd tried to root it. That'll come in handy in airports, where there's usually only pay-for-play Boingo hotspots. WiFi tethering will turn my phone into my own personal hotspot tapped into Verizon's 3G.
