[Today’s run: none]<\/p>\n
I spent about a day and a half this week working on moving my computer stuff to a new computer.<\/p>\n
The machine I had been using was a purchase at CSU Surplus, probably 5 years or more ago.\u00a0 It still runs OK, but was starting to suffer, particularly during Windows XP startup.<\/p>\n
The new machine is a dual-core Dell of 2010 vintage, just a normal deskside\/tower machine.<\/p>\n
The new machine came with Windows-7 installed and I wanted to continue to use XP so as to keep in sync with the people I work for\/with.\u00a0 So what I wanted to do was to just move the disk drives (1-XP, 1-linux) over and be done.\u00a0 But it didn’t work out that way very easily.<\/p>\n
The first problem was that the XP drive in the old machine was ATA with ribbon cable. The new machine is all SATA.\u00a0 So I purchased a cheap 1TB Western Digital disk at Office Depot and spent about a day playing around with that.\u00a0 I was booting from a USB drive into linux, then using ‘dd’ to do the copying.\u00a0 I actually had that working pretty well.\u00a0 But whenever I would move the drive to the new machine I got the blue screen of death\u00a0 (BSD).<\/p>\n
That wasn’t right.\u00a0 And so ended day one at about 11:00 pm.<\/p>\n
I came to my senses sometime overnight.\u00a0 First off, I decided to download the Western Digital disk cloning software, which I did.\u00a0 And I cloned the disk with that.\u00a0 Then I decided to actually look up the “Stop 0x000000007B” message using google.\u00a0 Low and behold, it was telling me that it didn’t like the drivers as assigned.\u00a0 I did some more googling and found some pointers to a way forward.<\/p>\n
What I did was, I went through the Device Manager and for every device which had a manufacturer-labeled driver I replaced that with a generic driver.\u00a0 You right-click on the device name and select “update driver” and you go into the advanced option and pick the driver which has a generic name instead of the “Intel super-whatsits ABC123” driver (or whatever, you get my drift).\u00a0\u00a0 Ask it not to reboot!<\/p>\n
Then you do a shutdown and move the drive to the new machine.\u00a0 When it started up there was some confusion about the pointer and keyboard.\u00a0 But it seemed to think awhile and work that out.\u00a0 And I was up!<\/p>\n
I then went to the Dell site and gathered up drivers for all of this stuff that I had marked generic.\u00a0 And the system is now up and running.<\/p>\n
It is much faster.\u00a0 I can run the cheapie-SDR software for my USB-SDR-thingy and it doesn’t bog down the whole world.\u00a0 I have twice as many CPU’s and more than twice as much memory.\u00a0 And the disks are faster too.<\/p>\n
So that is that.\u00a0 maybe I can keep this one going for another 5 years.\u00a0 Eventually I’m going to have to go to Windows 7\u00a0 (I set aside the Windows 7 hard drive and the install media).\u00a0 My PC has years and years worth of junk on it, including stuff which no longer exists but I cannot dis-install because I removed the guts already.\u00a0 I have layers of old stuff on here.\u00a0 The day I have to move to Windows 7 is not going to be fun!<\/p>\n
I’ve been thinking, maybe I should get a cheap 2-disk NAS (network attached storage) and put a couple of 2TB drives in it, mirrored, and start doing some real backups.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[Today’s run: none] I spent about a day and a half this week working on moving my computer stuff to a new computer. The machine I had been using was a purchase at CSU Surplus, probably 5 years or more ago.\u00a0 It still runs OK, but was starting to suffer, particularly during Windows XP startup. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3241"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3242,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3241\/revisions\/3242"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}