Dell XPS m1330, a most beautiful piece of shit

I remember being quite excited upon receiving my m1330.  It was a beautiful laptop.  Very sleek and original.  Relatively thin.  Powerful enough to run my WoW (at the time) by sporting an NVidia card.  I loved it.  I stopped using my Alienware desktop monstrosity almost entirely.  It was a bit pricey though, something like $1600 in '07/'08.  Perhaps the only complaint I had was that it came with Vista.

It's sad though, the innards of that thing ended up being junk.  I had to have it serviced every year.  It overheated, the video would give out, the motherboard would break. I even forked out dough for the extended warranty just to get it fixed (2nd time it died was shortly after the previous warranty expired but they let me buy the extended).  It was my main machine at the time, in particular since I had just moved and purged much of my wares, so I kept it serviced.  And a part of me wanted it to be a nice working machine because I really did like it cosmetically and feel-wise.

But at last, it just wasn't cutting it.  I'm not sure if it was the game upgrades or the vidcard or what, but WoW and other similar games became completely unplayable.  It ran a bit clunky.  It still had Vista on it just to run the games but when that stop it basically became a linux box.  So a year ago, upon getting the Alienware m11x, a machine I also love (though I still think I prefer the m11x look and feel-wise), I gave it to my sister.  Not much long after that, it started exhibiting more problems and basically quit on her.  I took it back, loaded it up with linux to find that it kept crashing.  I had good indication it was the hard drive so I bought another one.  Installed it, spent more time putting Ubuntu on it, had it just about set up the way I liked and wouldn't you know.... it completely gives up the ghost.  Won't power on or anything.  Pisses me off that I had just spent more money on it again only to have it bricked.

I've read about bad experiences with Dell and their machines.  It wasn't my experience for the most part, until now.  My previous laptop was also a Dell and although it ended up with some issues here and there, it worked for a looong time, on the order of 8 years or so.  And (having a warranty) I had fair service.  But now I'm very disappointed, doubly so because they put together a machine that I really wanted to like and they ruined it with shoddy parts and internal design and a hefty price tag.  Such is the life with gadgets I suppose.  I did try and look up how much it would cost me to fix it and I decided that I'd rather spend the money on a new netbook than sink it into an aging machine.  I did consider it though.  If I could have found a new mobo for, say, $50-70 I would have justified it as a geek hobby.

As to whether or not I'll ever trust Dell again to buy from them... Well, I probably will.  I mean, I already have with this Alienware but I'm HOPING that that subdivision of the company (acquired) has a higher standard and from what I read they mostly are.  I did have to have it serviced but it was only a fan that stopped working causing overheat and shutdown.  I'm getting good use out of it though and that's the important bit.  Also, sometimes the price is hard to ignore, I have the discount deals through my company and I have a work-issued Dell as well that is a clunky beast but is still kicking with nary a problem (other than a dead battery) in 3.5 years.

I just wish it wasn't the m1330 that ended up being the lemon.

CD access

I thought computer CD drives were ancient news, a solved problem, a triviality.  I can't believe I downloaded (a rather cool) program that can't access my CD drive like everything else I have can.  That program is foobar2000.  I did a beyond token amount of web searches trying to get it to work, stopping short of downloading some other program (Nero) to help it do it's job.  I just wanted to rip some songs to FLAC and was dumbfounded that the CD wouldn't access.  I may try again.

Floppy no more

For better or worse, I am now floppy free. I have given away all of my Zip disks, I have destroyed all of my 3.5" disks, and at long last I've taken some scissors to my 5.25" disks. This is all part of the great purge for my upcoming cross-country move. I feel a little antsy about it, but in the end I think it was inevitable.

I had kept 3.5" disks for emergencies for quite a while and I admit that there were times (when dealing with legacy programs and such). And I also had some even older 5.25" floppy disks. Those things had some old Wordstar, dBase III, Wordperfect, Newsroom Pro, and other data from way back in the DOS days. At some point, my computers did not have 5.25" drives anymore and yet I still kept them thinking that someday I'd get that data off of them. That day never came, until recently. Over the years I had asked coworkers and friends if they had any old computers with that drive; no one did. I considered going to an old electronics shop or even Ebay to get one, but didn't for 2 reasons: 1) I didn't want to spend money just to transfer old data that might not even be readable anymore, and 2) for most of these years I didn't have a desktop to install it in in the first place; I was pure laptop for a good 10 years due to grad school and moving and such. I did eventually get a gaming desktop machine but never reconsidered getting a 5.25". I was all ready to just declare it lost when I stumbled across an old PC in my landlord's basement. I got his permission to cannibalize it but it turns out that I didn't really need to. I did try to take the drive out and put it in my desktop only to discover that I didn't have the right connector. But the old computer was already working and running Windows 95 I think and it booted. The drive wasn't actually attached in the computer but after swapping out the 3.5" drive with it and playing with the BIOS it actually worked. Now the transfer problem... no network on it and no CD-burner on it. Fortunately for me, my landord is a techy and he had retrofitted an old USB1 card into it. I panicked a bit when my first attempt using a jump drive failed due to compatibility. But eventually I tried out some other ones that did work and voila, I was able to get my 20 year old data off these obsolete disks. Not that I'll be able to do anything much with them but this is history and I'm sentimental.... and trying not to be. Hence when I finally got the data off... snip snip and into the trash. Actually, that felt quite good. Space is limited and I've been carrying these things around with me for 20 years.

iOMeGa!

I've been digging through my shite recently and among other things found a box with my old Iomega Zip-100 drive in it. This thing is relatively ancient. I mean this is pre-USB. It connected to the computer via parallel port. In the box also was about a dozen zip disks. And what's more, there was stuff on it that I had absolutely no clue if I had backed up or transferred to any other hard-drives. What to do, what to do. I did NOT want install drivers on my Windows system which is polluted enough as it is. Well, my freshly minted Ubuntu install was up and the computer it was on had a parallel port, so why not? I began looking up info about these parallel port zip drives for use with Ubuntu. I recall a decade ago getting it to work with my Toshiba running Red Hat (I think it was 5) and having to do some insmod's and ppa's and using mtools and the like; basically I remember it requiring some work. After finding an appropriate page I hooked it up.

OMG! Without doing anything else, up pops the ZIP-100 icon on my desktop and a Nautilus window with the contents. I utterly did not expect that. That rocked. I mean, who uses parallel ports to attach devices these days, outside of perhaps a legacy printer much less a block device? It's not so much that I expected it to not work easily but even with Windows I expected having to download some drivers or installs or something. Way to go Ubuntu!

It's amusing to consider how my stack of zip disks and the reader fit can all fit on my keychain via a USB key now. Those things were destined to go the way of the floppy; in fact I think the floppy outlived them. I don't think I ever liked them but for a few years I must admit that they were indeed practical. In light of the MiniDisc, I still think zip disks should never have existed. But for now, I'm just stoked that practically no effort I got it connected and was able to move all of that data off. I now look forward to getting rid of the beasties. The fact that it worked so effortlessly almost made me want to keep it around for amusement. Almost. Now to figure out the most consciencious way to purge it from my possessions.

OMG, a piece of spyware on MY machine...

I've been smug. I didn't pay much attention to what's on my home Windows PC to the point where I didn't even take the basic precautionary steps for protecting one's PC that seem to be standard fare. I felt I didn't really have to. I mean, I don't execute programs emailed to me, I don't click on executable links, I don't install anything a web site asks me to (unless I independently grab said item from a trusted site, not the one they link, e.g. Flash updates and such). And I don't buy Sony CDs. For years I only booted up my PC at home to play Evercrack and then check email or web search for directions and such. Now, I still do those things but added iPod/iTunes to the regular usage list. Oh, I'm also on a re-newed mission to archive/scan/purge my collection of documents and other paper stuffs.

However over the weekend, a piece of spyware has been popping up unexpectedly. Never seen it on this new machine that I've had since late last year. Where did I get that? I pondered. Turns out it came over from my old machine when I transfered a bunch of stuff. Failing to effectively rid it on my own, I finally downloaded something sensable to scan/remove spyware: Ad-aware. Low and behold it notified me of several other things that I was unaware of. It was a sobering moment. Now I'm left with considering the possible virus-scanners out there, most of which I detest installing due to annoyingly bad experiences with Norton Anti-Virus (and even McAfee). Those programs, while good to have were very intrusive and always seemed to cause problems with programs I use, especially games. I just want a virus checker that I can run on my own when I feel I need to, not one that creates popups at the most inconvenient times, one that doesn't pester me every 5 minutes to update it, one that doesn't slow my bootup to a crawl, one that doesn't reside on my taskbar, one that doesn't always reside in memory unless I'm actively running it.

Relatedly, I hate that every single program that I install wants to put an auto-run or other memory-resident item on my taskbar, and put icons in a gazillion places.

Home Linux again

I haven't had a working home installation of Linux since grad school. Back then it was an ancient Red Hat on my old Toshiba Satellite Pro. Came in really handy. I eventually put Winblows back on it near the end when I lost my home-T1 access but also because I wanted to use Illustrator to work on the graphics in my Diss and a couple other pieces of software. When I finally got a new laptop some 5-odd years ago, I tried several of the newer distributions on that old Toshiba. The install scripts always failed. I did a modicum of research and with the help of a company IT guy I got X to work, like for a day. Rebooting always crashed though. I gave up and gave the laptop away. It was way old anyways with a small drive, little memory, slow processor, small screen... only thing I truly liked about it was the keyboard keys.

So after getting a new computer last year I figured it was time to do it again but with my older Dell laptop. This time, I didn't want to put a lot of time into it, I have enough personal projects to keep me busy. I was going to use the first distro that worked, starting with Gentoo. I burned the latest install CD 2006.0. Tried both install scripts with a couple different configs including the defaults and it failed each time. Did a couple searches but decided that rather than fix it I moved on to Ubuntu which I was also curious about. It worked as advertised, with only a couple gotchas.