Personal Dork Assistant

Geekery

Fry's Friday ad (the primary reason I subscribe to the paper) advertised 120 GB Western Digital 5400 RPM hard disks for $109. So it's not the fastest hard drive out there, but that's actually an advantage when it comes to upgrading Tivos, which doesn't take advantage of super-high transfer rates anyway. Had been tempted to pick up a Maxtor from NewEgg, but you can't beat 90 cents a gig. Picked up the hard disk and a screwdriver set for the Torx screws in the Tivo. After that, it's just a matter of following instructions, although knowing the meaning of the Linux incantations does help, especially when one wrong move can turn the Tivo into a boat anchor. So now I have 49 hours on Best video quality instead of 9, and I have a backup of the system software to boot, in case the hard disk ever bites the dust. Just in time for those World Cup games.

Had been running a pirated version of Windows XP on a VMWare virtual machine to make sure it was safe. Everything seemed to work well enough, so I decided to give it a shot on the real machine. Quite the adventure it was:

• Try to upgrade directly from the CD. Get a boatload of warnings about obsolete drivers and the setup program bails.
• Uninstall the offending drivers. XP Setup is satisfied and starts chugging.
• Setup locks up halfway through the installation. That's not good.
• Reboot off of the CD. Doesn't seem to be any major damage. Install directly off the CD and it seems to go well.
• Oooh... XP pretty. It even automatically setup a dual-booting configuration with the original NT installation. The problem is that it didn't pick up any of the previous settings and installed programs.
• Reboot into the old NT installation. Try the XP Upgrade option again. Hey, this time it works.
• So now I have an upgraded XP installation with all my old programs and settings right there. The problem is that I also have a fresh installation sitting there taking up space. Dual booting two copies of WinXP is not very exciting.
• Scour the Microsoft knowledge base and the web for details on how to remove the extra installation.
• Perform the surgery by deleting a few folders and editing a few config files.
• Phew, didn't wipe out anything important. Also found out how to get rid of MSN Messenger, so let's kill that, too.

So that was 2.5 installations of XP, which is no fun with the ancient CD-ROM drive I "salvaged" from an old machine in the lab, more reboots than I can count, plus a few scary crashes. Makes Linux look good. Well, maybe not, considering what my office-mate has had to deal with. The spiff new interface features is making the old Voodoo 3 seem a little slow, but I don't want a video card with a fan, which makes the Zalman fanless GeForce4 Ti 4400 seem pretty sexy. Too bad it also seems pretty expensive, although I do like Zalman's quiet cooling products.