Microsoft Windows 7 - Gain without much Pain . . .

With the impending end of Microsoft’s support for their venerable and very successful Windows XP, I had been wrestling with the relative benefits of either “upgrading” my existing main desktop PC to Windows 7, or replacing it entirely, with the risk of having to put up with the almost universally reviled Windows 8.

I had been using Windows 7 on a  borrowed PC for some time and had become relatively comfortable with that environment, and so decided to take the plunge and go down the “upgrade” route with my 7-year old, reasonably specced (for its time) machine.

I purchased a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium from a seemingly reputable (according to the feedback) EBay supplier  and a brand new hard drive from EBuyer.com ( the thinking there being that there was an easy route back if the Windows 7 installation proved to be a disaster).

I have to say that the whole business went surprisingly well right from the initial minor surgery to replace the primary hard drive on my PC, which even included a vacuum out of the dust, cobwebs and general detritus which had accumulated in the last 12 months since I last had the machine apart.

The Windows 7 installation itself went very smoothly, the most anxious moments being those during which I waited with baited breath to see if my 25-digit licence code would be accepted (it was!).

I am not a player of games, apart from the “normal secretarial duties” of EMails, web surfing and writing documents, my machine spends most of its time running fairly esoteric Audio Spectrum Analysis DSP software associated with my hobby of recording “radio meteors” so the amount of software I had to re-install was relatively small.   Everything I installed worked pretty well without any problems and here I am a day later with a machine with a completely new operating system installed running every program I use regularly, consequently I am as “Pleased as Punch”.

The only downside is that of the new Microsoft Office 2013 which I have had “in stash” for a while ready to be installed on a Windows 7 (or later) machine.   This has appears to have been designed to have a “Windows 8” look about it, and frankly it’s horrible to look at.  I felt obliged to install this heavyweight package due to it (a) being cheap due to an arrangement my employer has with Microsoft, and (b) there is no built-in EMail client in Windows 7.  

I could of course opted for something like OpenOffice with Mozilla Thunderbird, but I had the Office install disk already.   Maybe more on that later, but at the moment I am struggling to find any nice words about Office 2013, but I should probably give it more time before I put virtual pen to paper!  It appears to work fine, but it just looks DREADFUL.   That’s a great shame as one of Windows 7‘s greatest appeals is that it “looks nice”, to me, anyway . . .

Good News, Bad News

First the Good News.

I believe the PC which was whacked by a virus/trojan/bot last weekend, courtesy of a "driver site" is now back up and running having been seemingly "de-loused".

As it was still partially crippled, even after a Windows XP "repair" from the OEM CD, whilst I was driving up to the top of Scotland at the beginning of the last working week I figured that one way of dealing with the problem was to connect the affected PC's hard drive as an additional drive to a fully functioning PC, and to virus scan it from that PC.

This is what I did yesterday, and the virus scan found a few suspect files and zapped them.

Once the "cleansed" drive was reconnected to its proper PC and that was booted, it was immediately evident that the nasties had in fact been purged.

I then fixed the on board virus checker (this PC runs Microsoft Security Essentials) with a "hotfix" downloaded from Microsoft, and then let Windows Updater catch up with everything, including re-installing Service Pack 3.

I took the opportunity to vacuum out the PC, a Dell Dimension 3100, which always has been blissfully quiet and generally tidy up all the cabling associated with it, no trivial job I can assure you!

Anyhow, it all seems to be in reasonably fettle now, and I have once again started up my QRSS grabber, though I think I won't reinstate the Apache Web Server.

As part of the rescuing of the situation I moved all affected sites off site, and I will leave them there for the moment.

Now the Bad News.

On a whim, I extracted my TS-180S from the shed with a view to giving it a little exercise as it has been lying discarded for a few months.

To my horror upon firing it up I found I once again had a "dead" digital display.   The receiver is still working as it was when I put it to one side, but when last used it had a fully functioning display.   My favoured theory at the moment is that I disturbed some wiring when I tidied it all up before putting the covers on.  

Knowing the previous track record of this radio, that might be wishful thinking!

Bother ... !!

I've finally made my peace with (Pendrive) Linux!

I suppose I am about to admit that I've been wrong all along, that I didn't really understand what Linux is all about, etc, etc.

Undoubtedly that's true.

What has changed my view is the fact that I've been using for some little time now a "Pendrive Linux" Ubuntu distro, and that has served me very well. So well that I really ought to be grateful and revise my opinions about Linux in general.

With this software, which as has been hinted at above, is installed on a USB "PenDrive", I have been able to (for example) surf the Internet using my "work laptop" (fairly well locked down by my company's IT department) whilst working away from home, staying in hotels, and so on.

This distro has performed without any problems for several months, other than running out of space, and that was down to me not setting it up with adequate space to start with, rather than it being a problem with the software itself.

I can connect to my POP3 Email accounts at will, and even do other arcane stuff such as analyse configurations of whatever WiFi network I am connected to as required and work around them if possible.

For a piece of free software, this has to be a Good Thing!