Entries Tagged 'Computer related' ↓

I need to replace my laptop (an aging Inspiron 8200) and I’m being encouraged (or bullied ;)) to get a Mac from all sides.

Now I’ve always had a PC, and (save for servers and Virtual Machines) that PC has always run windows. 3.11, 95, 98, XP. A lot of XP. And I’ve been happy with it - it’s stable, annoyingly slow sometimes, but works. I have a lot of Windows-only software; some free, a lot of it bought. When I feel limited by Windows I switch to Ubuntu, or (cunningly) Win32 ports of all the useful Linux tools

So looking at laptops, I stand and consider what I’d gain. An expensive purchase, a new Operating System to learn, shedloads of software to buy (either that or run Parallels/VMWare and end up using Windows half the time), and something just slightly different from the Linux I’m used to - different enough to make things annoying (like the parameters for reloading apache - why do so many distros have different ones? Anyway, I digress…)

Lots of people are Mac users now, and in the web development world they seem very popular. Simon Willison is an example; the PHP conference last year was pretty Mac’d up.

Others don’t. I have a theory a lot of people don’t use Macs, but they’re unnoticed because they don’t spend so much time talking about how wonderful thei computer is And having watched a colleague’s Mac crash more frequently than I’ve ever made XP crash, and need rebooting just as often, I’m not overly impressed.

If I go to a Mac, aside from the extra initial cost (Macs are expensive) I need to take into account I have over £1000 in Windows-only software, plus Adobe Creative Suite 3 for Windows. My desktop PC will continue to run Windows, so I would be switching between platforms during the day.

Listening to Mac freaks raving about their computers I’m wondering if a Mac is something you only ‘get’ by owning one - or if people just forget that Windows ever did the job once they buy one

So I throw out the question to all of you. Why should I (or should I not) go for a Mac? What is there that, as a long-time PC user, I’m missing which makes Mac users so… overwhelmed by their Macs? As a web developer, have you found a Mac has made you more productive? Does it do anything you couldn’t do with a PC running Windows or Linux?

Abit’s AB9 motherboard is very good by all accounts.  However it has one rather annoying flaw: the AB9 BIOS it shipped with (revision 13) has problems with IDE devices (such as a CD-ROM drive) which prevents Windows from being installed.  This is because it needs a SATA/RAID driver installed, as it’s not got an IDE controller on the motherboard (I think - I’m hazy about the real problem).

The motherboard ships with a floppy containing drivers to load during the Windows installation process.  But even after I borrowed a floppy drive, they didn’t work for me.

The solution, as noted in the ebuyer reviews, is simple: upgrade the BIOS.  However, this is easier said than done.  If you have a floppy drive or can make workable floppy boot discs then great - I didn’t and when I borrowed one, couldn’t. Having spent somewhere over five hours trying different approaches, here is a writeup of my approach - hopefully it will help someone!

My penultimate attempt was using a DrDOS bootable CD burned with Nero 7, with the BIOS files burned to the CD.  I figured this would work, and indeed DrDOS booted and loaded.  However, due to these IDE access issues (the problem I needed to upgrade the BIOS to cure), I couldn’t cd to the CD-ROM drive in order to run the BIOS update files - DOS didn’t know any CD-ROM drive was attached to the system.

The solution came in the shape of the Ultimate Boot CD, which contains amongst many things a copy of FreeDOS… with support for USB (if you fiddle around with the options when it’s loading - the dialogs which pop up for ~3 seconds are very important!). 

Don’t be distracted by the fact FreeDOS says it can enable CD-ROM drive support - it can’t due to the ABIT BIOS problems!

Once I’d got the USB support enabled (Tip: every time a dialog appears as FreeDOS loads, go to “Configure” in order to have time to read it) I was able to plug in a FAT formated USB drive with the BIOS update on it, cd to the USB drive and flash the motherboard’s BIOS.

After that Windows installed without any problems.  And I now have a fast computer!

Thank you Jonny & Robin for letting me use your CD burner in order to get this far!

Today I went out to Lynmouth for a walk, taking my camera. Unfortunately all my batteries were nearly flat, and one set ran out of power while writing an image to the SmartMedia card, corrupting it.

When I got back I started looking for data recovery tools. I found the following:

* “Davory”:http://www.x-ways.net/davory/index-m.html
* “MediaRECOVER”:http://www.mediarecover.com/

Davory didn’t work on the card but MediaRECOVER did, which gave me hope. But I wasn’t going to pay $30 if I could help it
10 minutes surfing turned up the following two FREE tools:

* “Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery”:http://www.z-a-recovery.com/digital_image_recovery.htm
* “Jpegdump”:http://www.goto.onlinehome.de/dsc/jpegdump.htm

Again, ZADIR didn’t work (why I’ve no idea, as it definitely was analysing the card) but Jpegdump did it! So I now have back all my photos… cool!

Highly recommended tool to keep to hand - and a big thank you to their authors for releasing them free of charge.