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New Win7 64-bit install done and (mostly) tuned
And I woke up on the right side of the lawn today -- yeah! 
Windows XP was getting a little too long in the tooth so I upgraded to Windows 7 64-bit on my old XP machine.
The old machine likes it and so do I.
The install was painless, virtually flawless, and I've spent the last month learning the new system while collecting a lot of nifty-keen new 64-bit tools and software. The machine itself tossed one BSOD at me while I was setting up the system that basically said, "No you can not use that video driver!" Oops.... <Scooby-Laugh>
So the machine has hummed and clicked and the drive lights flashed and the cooling fans shifted on down into overdrive while the system indexed and virus-tested three drives with over four terabytes and seven-million files. While it's been busy doing all of that, I've been stress testing and generally beating the snawte out of the rest of the OS and a bunch of Alpha development snapshots for a new Chrome-based browser:-
Vivaldi
A Browser for Our Friends
Vivaldi is free and it's being developed and funded by the same people that wrote and developed the Opera browser before it went down the tube. Vivaldi and the whole system are doing well so far and I've been catching up on some of the file sorting, labeling and converting that I've been putting off in one form or another for the last twenty-eight years. I built this machine back in 2005 as a mid-range home Digital A/V workstation so it's a solid bit of kit as a Brit put it. It's not surprising that it still plays and views every media and image file and format I've tossed at it without straining itself but the browser, ah, well, the browser is still in the Alpha development phase, one step removed from the third Technical Preview so it can do virtually anything from spontaneously combusting some random piece of hardware to a relatively controlled soft landing with puppies, kittens, unicorns and rainbows. When things go really, truly wrong there is still a brilliant rainbow but all of the puppies, kittens, and unicorns spontaneously combust.
Last night it was using 1.5G of memory for three open tabs and I just shook my head, shut it down and restarted the browser. The open-source Chrome browser engine is a memory and resource pig but the Vivaldi developers have sworn they'll be able to fix it. Today it's mostly stable but sometimes I think the developers are more than a little bit like Ahab (Gregory Peck) harpooning and riding the whale.
Vivaldi will occasionally miss/drop characters in an input box remarkably similar to the one used for Forum messages and there's one really annoying glitch I've been trying to catch that will cause the entire GUI to flash-crash and disappear in less than one shake of a lambs tail while leaving several parts of itself in memory all running around headless and totally out of control.
Well, it doesn't look like it's going to crash this time so it's back to watching YouTube videos while I try to find, catalog, sort and index more than three gigabytes of e-mail that's been carried forward with every hardware and OS upgrade since 1987.
D'oh!
All I had to do was think about doing something else and -- BOOM! Man, it went right out from under me as I was typing but this time I have some traces and logs to work with -- Yippee ki-ay, m...!
.
Windows XP was getting a little too long in the tooth so I upgraded to Windows 7 64-bit on my old XP machine.
The old machine likes it and so do I.
The install was painless, virtually flawless, and I've spent the last month learning the new system while collecting a lot of nifty-keen new 64-bit tools and software. The machine itself tossed one BSOD at me while I was setting up the system that basically said, "No you can not use that video driver!" Oops.... <Scooby-Laugh>
So the machine has hummed and clicked and the drive lights flashed and the cooling fans shifted on down into overdrive while the system indexed and virus-tested three drives with over four terabytes and seven-million files. While it's been busy doing all of that, I've been stress testing and generally beating the snawte out of the rest of the OS and a bunch of Alpha development snapshots for a new Chrome-based browser:-
Vivaldi
A Browser for Our Friends
Vivaldi is free and it's being developed and funded by the same people that wrote and developed the Opera browser before it went down the tube. Vivaldi and the whole system are doing well so far and I've been catching up on some of the file sorting, labeling and converting that I've been putting off in one form or another for the last twenty-eight years. I built this machine back in 2005 as a mid-range home Digital A/V workstation so it's a solid bit of kit as a Brit put it. It's not surprising that it still plays and views every media and image file and format I've tossed at it without straining itself but the browser, ah, well, the browser is still in the Alpha development phase, one step removed from the third Technical Preview so it can do virtually anything from spontaneously combusting some random piece of hardware to a relatively controlled soft landing with puppies, kittens, unicorns and rainbows. When things go really, truly wrong there is still a brilliant rainbow but all of the puppies, kittens, and unicorns spontaneously combust.
Last night it was using 1.5G of memory for three open tabs and I just shook my head, shut it down and restarted the browser. The open-source Chrome browser engine is a memory and resource pig but the Vivaldi developers have sworn they'll be able to fix it. Today it's mostly stable but sometimes I think the developers are more than a little bit like Ahab (Gregory Peck) harpooning and riding the whale.
Vivaldi will occasionally miss/drop characters in an input box remarkably similar to the one used for Forum messages and there's one really annoying glitch I've been trying to catch that will cause the entire GUI to flash-crash and disappear in less than one shake of a lambs tail while leaving several parts of itself in memory all running around headless and totally out of control.
Well, it doesn't look like it's going to crash this time so it's back to watching YouTube videos while I try to find, catalog, sort and index more than three gigabytes of e-mail that's been carried forward with every hardware and OS upgrade since 1987.
D'oh!
All I had to do was think about doing something else and -- BOOM! Man, it went right out from under me as I was typing but this time I have some traces and logs to work with -- Yippee ki-ay, m...! .
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