Logbook: Computers
Oh the fun of Windows XP (fun with windows activation)
I’ve made some hardware updates to my machine and really the biggest pain of any machine I’ve built is one thing… Windows XP. As I sit here I have a legit copy of the software but, Every time I’ve reinstalled since maybe the 5th time I’ve reinstalled over the years there is one nagging thing that outright just pisses me off.
Windows Activation….. Its basically the most annoying prospect on this planet. After entering the product key than clicking the keys in the small keys in the bottom right it says “you can activate windows over the Internet or over the phone” the Internet will be quickest and easiest .. my ass… if you have had windows a couple of years you will run into this same activation wall. Basically, once you have activated your windows a few times you will get an error:
“this copy of windows has been activated too many times”
An option for a entering another key comes up or you have to dial up the 1-800 Number, So you call the 800 number and you are greeted by a female robot that asks you questions. Rather than being able to input your answers by keypad your stuck with dealing with a voice response system. Now being a voice recognition system your already aggravated due to the point you have to speak like Anakin Skywalker from the first starwars movie, if you don’t speak with any emotion or even twinge the wrong way you should get through the first prompts ok, but when it comes to the next part which is speaking a forty-eight digit string of numbers.
You will need the powers of a jedi , A vulcan and an android in order not to loose your sanity.
8 groups of 6 numbers each , or so you think….. you start slowly and speak each number like every emotion has been ripped from your head and your the original terminator .. if you succeed you will hear a bell signaling that you’ve just passed the first trial, if not the “friendly” robot voice says it does not understand you and to repeat the numbers again. You try the numbers a second time and wait for the bell.. if not your treated to the third form of this torturous adventure. Keypad entry …. If you input the keys on a poor signal from say a cell phone, your fucked, because the robot will kick you back to voice prompt or the 4th option. If your lucky and you don’t fart breath the wrong way or scratch and itch you get to the end of the numbers. The robot now tells you to hold on and is validating your install.. You breath a sigh of relief for a mo- “sorry I can not validate this install You are now being transferred to a representative”
In the moment you channel every emotion you’ve held back in the past 5 minutes and try to channel enough anger over the phone hoping that the robot explodes. As your own robot demeanor slowly turns into darth vader after finding out his ship was towed for parking in a non-sith zone.
The thought of throwing the disc across the room and killing something with it comes to mind.. Finally you get an operator, They ask for the First six digits of the installation ID, Than after that it turns into a interrogation.
You get asked questions
- Did you buy this software at a store…
- How many Machines do you have this software installed on.
- Is this your first time activating this software
- How many machines is this software installed on(again)
This is what pisses me off to the core.. I purchased this software from a fucking store.. I have in my hand the damn case for the disk an original CD and now I’m getting 20 questions? I did not pirate the damn thing.. (who would be stupid enough to call on a pirated disk ? ) And the fact they ask you twice about how many machines its installed on is just about Saying your trying to steal the disk. what the fuck? How about instead of beating around the bush.. just ask outright . ARE YOU STEALING THIS SOFTWARE! After the interrogation you get to the next fun part of the “easy activation”
Now i have nothing against foreign call centers but at this point your bloods boiling you’ve just used every ounce of mental strength not to go batshit crazy over the phone and now the fun begins.. you are read a forty-two digit code from someone who does have an accent that sometimes can be VERY hard to understand. So at times your asking to go back but occasionally you will get a person who is rattles off the numbers like they’re an Auctioneer onethreefoursevensixfive HOOOOOOOOOLD THE FUCK ON…
after what seems forever and a day and half you finally get through this depleted and wanting to kill something you have windows activated till the next time you upgrade/something goes wrong/you look at windows the wrong way/ your cat sneezes.
this activation crap needs to be fine tuned .. or at least have some sort of system where you can de-authorize an activation like bioshock did. Honestly when it comes to the next edition of windows or even Vista I cant afford it. So I’m stuck on XP. But every time I’ve had a problem i don’t feel like saying more numbers than a Stock sheet in the newspaper.
If you look at it, Its a 48 to 96+ digits for an installation key because of the autobot phone lady, Not to mention if that fails its another 48+ digits after that. six more digits If you get “too many activations and the megamaid robot cant authorize your windows”. Than another 42+ digits for the “confirmation ID”, so in total its anywhere from
Ninety-six to one-hundred and ninety-two spoken numbers over the phone.. that’s just totally insane.
Site Dry spell.
I’ve not posted in awhile , Just a little dry spell but, now i’ll get back up posting on the site. One of the main reasons was I updating my PC, The computer i was using has been having a rough time with things. Upgraded to 2.7GHz processor and a new geforce 9800 gt to boot.
so after going through a few reformats and 20 gallons of coffee I’ve finally got everything together. My biggest annoyance is Windows Activation, I’ve reformatted through almost every hardware change and activation for xp is just a big pain in the ass because you get the “you’ve activated this product to many times”. Which is nothing short of saying FU to the customer who has a legit version of xp.
Also I have currently installed window 7, I had it installed before but made the mistake of installing it over XP, That was a huge mistake – for as well as 7 runs there are some things that just don’t run and your better off having a dual boot to get around that. Windows 7 as far as i am concerned is an improvement over Vista but, I am not totally confident that the current state of 7 will last. Microsoft started vista the same way , in the early beta’s it looked good but once they let the devs put all the crazy shit like UAC in it went down the hole. The methods they use to get to certain menus is silly. Gaming for the PC with vista has been hit or miss but, mostly miss. the performance hits I’ve seen from vista keep me going to XP , With 7 I’ve actually seen some decent frame rates in games without taking a huge hit. The annoyance factors with windows 7 Have been slightly minimized but not to a level I like, Its not like Vista where every action is followed by a warning (are you sure you want to breath *accept/deny). Also with Microsoft coming out with 7248572 version of vista is pure annoyance, Windows XP started with 2 editions Home and professional that was fine, They later added MCE (media center edition). But when Vista came out they went with version clusterfuck, most sites list 6 version but in reality its 11+ versions of the same OS
- Windows Vista Starter
- Windows Vista Home Basic
- Windows Vista Home Basic 64
- Windows Vista Home Premium
- Windows Vista Home Premium 64
- Windows Vista Business
- Windows Vista Business 64
- Windows Vista Enterprise
- Windows Vista Enterprise 64
- Windows Vista Ultimate
- Windows Vista Ultimate 64
- Windows Vista Ultimate bill gates limited edition
- Windows Vista Ultimate bill gates limited edition 64
Sure you can say some of its redundant but its way the fuck too much. hopefully with 7 they have ALOT less versions because going through all that feels like going through all the Sims 2 expansion packs from EA no thanks. Hopefully windows 7 will be like XP was after they released there nightmare windows ME
My printer is slightly confused today….
I’ve been having problems installing a printer, when i finally got it installed it threw an interesting error
Your
has less than 20% of ink remaining. Click Buy Now to purchase Genuine Epson Ink for your Buy Now/Where to Buy online. Shipping available only in the continental U.S. Click Remind Me Later to see this screen again when the level falls below 10107372%.damn .. I want a printer cartridge with 10107372% ink
Phone Fun .. Katana LX mini-review
I was on a Pay as you go plan for AT&T and it worked out well if you made next to no calls. but then again there were times you were forced to make calls. That got expensive quick, the silly rounding rules for minutes killed off money faster than anything. After signing up to sprint on there low plan 29.99 for 200 minutes.
The Katana lx is decent looking phone but looks do not make up for its problems. the problem maybe more from my point of view, but moreso they tend to be things I look for in a phone and i have basic requirements for a phone.
1. to make calls
2. that the phone is somewhat configurable
3. can add/make own ringtones.
4. Durable
well the phone right out of the box passes only on #1 and #4. I had started with a bluetooth connector the phone connected right up but after that the phone really as far as accessing data and such was worthless, the best that could be done is a tether if you had a DataPlan.
Another issue i have with sprint is the fact that the phones dont use Sim cards which makes programing your phonebook a pain in the ass and you look like an ass doing it with 2 phones in hand. As Far as a Dead basic phone the Katana LX is just that.
After the bluetooth try i figured maybe the USB Cable would be more fruitful in getting the phone to be somewhat responsive , I was wrong, as Far as drivers from Sanyo – Good luck with that. It took me two days of looking and when i finally did get it working , the phone did Even less than when connected to bluetooth.
But for being a basic phone it does have its pluses , You can hear it ring from jupiter on its loudest setting. The T9 texting was decent.. but overall it was not what I would personally want in a phone.
So after talking to the rep at the sprint store I ended up returning the Katana after a good weeks use and learning its up and downs.
The phone would be good for someone who just wants to have a phone with not many bells and whistles.
Cuil sucks ..
Cuil A new search engine that came out, On the day it was released they plastered every site possible that they had come out with this. The company says that Cuil is Irish (Gaelic) for knowledge, It should stand for pile of shit. really what it seems is Cuil maybe knowledge but in no way experienced, there search just doesn’t make sense. Just a simple test will prove that. Cuil claims to have a larger index than any other search engine, with about 120 billion web pages. ok that’s stretching it there.. BADLY The only way for them to index that many webpages (4 times as much as googles index ) is to take every irrelevant page and index it , but thats cant be it , because why is it anything you search You get absolutely NO results relevant to your search, Dunkin donuts brings up the providence civic center. there Storage method for finding pages is insanity. you could Probably search what ever your looking for than type in moose balls in anger and find what your actually looking for .
Maybe someday this will be the next google but as far as knowledge that cuil claims to have its just not there. they basically make it where if you had a set of encyclopedias, and you searched “Car” the result would not be the “car” your looking for but rather opening up a random encyclopedia and finding a random Car stuff in under something completely irrelevant like the Carina constellation because it contains the word car.
from there site..
Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.
Translation: blah blah blah we’re jealous of google, cuil blindly picks out words we think are related, More useless filler words because we don’t know what the fuck we are doing, We like adding big words and make it sound really personalized to you!
That’s about the right translation.
Now that I’ve typed out this clusterfuck Lets see how Cuils Search Picks up on this and i BET it wont show up under cuil sucks or cuil sucks monkey nuts or cuil sucks buffalo ass.
One more Test
Cuil = 12 results for cuil sucks
Google = 9,330 for cuil sucks. (0.14 seconds)
seems strange for the lack of cuil not indexing 9318 pages..
GTA Moronity part II
Went out to pick up a shelf today with bluesteel, We decided to stop at gamestop. so we poked around the Gamecube games and picked up a few. but in the time we saw at least 4 parents picking up GTA 4 for there kids. With the news going crazier than britney spears on a normal day about GTA it seems like parents dont give a shit about GTA/NEWs reports. so basically its a few crazy fucks going off on fictional material in the game that doesn’t exist. but Over all it was pretty entertaining to see that.
VD-W2 Wii VGA cable part III.
Over the weekend i picked up a few GameCube games, Metroid Prime , F-zero GX, Killer7and Need for speed Hot pursuit 2. Now i previously wrote about the VD-W2 Wii VGA cable, This is the first time I’ve had a problem with the cable. The first game i tried was NFS:HS the game starts up and the display on the monitor goes nuts. Typical, EA and more crap they put out, You would figure as the one of the “top” gaming manufactures, it would support 480p. The gamecube supports 480p , but theres a catch. in order to get the game in 480p you need to hold down the B button on the gamecube controller when starting the game.
this is a small problem in my opinion since i don’t play too many GC games. But, if you intend to play Game Cube games using the VGA cable There is a list too help you out at Mobygames.com .
Overall the cable in my opinion is worth it with the one minor downfall of not supporting GC in 480i , but Most of the good games are supported in 480p for the game cube.
overall i’d say the cable too me is a 9/10 with that small drawback (to me)
Console Gaming without a TV part II..(VD-W2 Wii VGA cable)
I do not usually watch TV, the last TV i had I ended up giving up because it just took up too much space. So I’ve always used my PC to watch Movies, Play games and such , until i purchased the Wii. From my last post
Console Gaming and Movie watching
I have tried almost every PC HD TV card under the sun in order to get a better picture/ less lag time out of the display with results fairing for the worse rather than better. One of my biggest problems was screen lag time.. On the HD Cards you had at least a full second of delay while moving the cursor around, on the analog card the lag time was barely perceivable but enough where it was noticeable if you had played on a TV, also If the PC is doing ANYTHING what so ever , you will get graphical corruption in the display thats the fault of the PC not the Wii. As far as using a TV card the display is fuzzy in fullscreen.
After all those cards my thoughts on internal tuner cards for PC’s are they are all piles of shit… But, looking around i saw one possibility the VD-W2 Wii VGA cable from Vdigi I had taken my time on ordering this because I didn’t see any sort of review for this cable. Also being from HongKong and I am weary of Ordering from sites i don’t know. Resellerratings.com had next to No information about them, After much thinking I finally decided to order the thing…
After an impatient 2 week wait the cable arrived in a simple brown envelope from hongkong. Following the USPS tracking site.. Not really worth even tracking because they barely update you on the location of your goods. Anyways the packaging is dead simple , right to the point, you don’t need user testimonials on how it works. Anyways anything with a billion testimonials usually is a pile of shit.
the cable seems to be built of really good quality, Setup is a breeze as long as you understand the basic premise of what your doing. since the monitor your plugging into does not have an analog tuner, you have to use the component cable plug in on a tv
The Green RCA jack you just plug into a TV and power on the wii , After doing so you goto your system menu and Display selection of 480i or 480p , You want to choose 480p , but doing this will look like something bad is happening . the screen will look completely fucked, don’t worry here, because the TV doesnt know how to handle the signal. after this Power down your Wii , Disconnect the Green RCA than proceed to connect the Cable to the monitor , you will need a male to male VGA connector/Wire to complete this action, After that you should be all set on Connecting up to your monitor.
As far as quality goes , the cable kicks ass.
it removed every problem you would have with a TV card and basically gives you the same response as you would get on a TV screen. with the added bonus of You can turn off your PC to play the console if you run your Console like i do.
Lets see where this goes… Logitech this is in your hands now. Part I
I’ve always loved logitechs mice and keyboards , I would recommend them to anyone in the past … but now since having multiple hardware failures with the G7 double clicking when your just trying to single click. my confidence has been shaken. Hopefully I wont have to jump through 87 hoops to get this replace but this is chapter one in firing emails off to logitech. I just want a damn mouse that works without being fucking possessed to completely screw up at anything its doing.
Logitech G7 Revolutions… the circle is complete.
Yes i had to make the bad title joke…
From my first post about the logitech G7 to the RMA post , and now this post which i shall pretty much regard as a postmortem for the G7 series.