Matt Charlton

Great. 

Absolutely effing marvellous.  

It would appear that I’m developing a bout of Acute viral rhinopharyngitis.  Don’t get too worried though, it’s just the common cold (thanks Wikipedia).

I mean there’s enough of it going around at work at the moment, I can think of at least two people who are recovering from one and another who has just started.  It’s just one of those things.  No matter how careful you are to wash your hands, cover your mouth when you cough, sneeze etc, the bloody thing just keeps on going.  

Felt completely out of it today.  Started with a headache (due to the radiator in the bedroom being on half the night – a problem I’ve now solved with the help of the handy twisty thing at the end), took some ibuprofen which solved that bit.  A few hours later I was feeling completely whacked and out of it at the same time.  My vision seemed weird and I couldn’t walk in a straight line.  I think this particular cold is targeting my ears and balance system.  Excellent, as if I wasn’t impaired enough where that was concerned (only one working eardrum, tumor when I was three in my left ear, eardum and three hearing bones removed).  

I hate the snotty nose part of a cold.  That stage where all it does is produce and produce and produce.  Once it’s stopped and you start getting better and you’ve just got the cough to take care of, I can handle that bit.  I just hate having a fuzzy head and a runny nose.  

Just in time for the weekend, at least I can rest up with no plans (so far) made, xbox and chilling out are on the menu.  Thank god my slanket arrived a few weeks ago :p

My new 1TB hard disk drives arrive tomorrow, that’s my evening sorted.  I’ve got to get the data off the old drives, install the new ones, reinstall windows on one of the slightly larger drives, move allsorts around, blah.  It’ll probably take me most of tomorrow night if not part of Saturday too depending on how quick the hard disk transfer rate is from the USB sata kit I have.  

I might be as well opening her up and plugging in direct to the motherboard, at least that way the data transfer will be quicker.  

Might also reinstall Vista on the laptop (yes, yes, third reinstall in as many months).  Sick of Windows 7.  Especially sick of IE8.  Windows 7 isn’t all that much different to Vista, it’s annoying that iTunes doesn’t auto start when I connect my iphone and it’s annoying that I have to use Chrome and Firefox because MS won’t let Beta users have access to IE8 RC1.  

Chrome is pretty nice, it just doesn’t work with a few sites, I have to use firefox for them.  The ones where neither work, I have to (try) to use IE8. 

Going to take a couple of night nurse tablets and call it a night, hopefully I won’t feel too bad in the morning.  I hope my body behaves itself and doesn’t start doing strange things in regards to weight/water retention between now and Saturday.  Last thing I need when I feel crappy is to have a shitty weigh in.  

One day left at work for the week, weekend is on the way.  Yay.

Sometimes.  I really do. 

Had a fairly major issue with the laptop this morning.  I’ve noticed the last few days that I was suffering from the same problem I had a few months ago – basically the laptop wouldn’t boot first time whenever it was started from cold.  It’d get past the green progress bar, just to the part where it launches the GUI and would sit there on a black screen.  To recover you had to hold the power button down, hard power off, power back on and it booted straight into Windows. 

Basically it’s down to the issue detailed in this article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946532

It’s caused by a problem with a transactional NTFS process apparently.  The issue is rectified in SP1, the problem is if you’ve experienced a lockup prior to installing SP1, the only solution is to wipe and reinstall. 

Due to me fiddling around with the Windows 7 beta, then deciding to go back to Vista so that I could do something or other less than a month ago, I’d been through a resetup recently and so didn’t really have all that much installed.  I decided to back up my iTunes library, WoW installation and Steamcache to the second hard disk and prep the laptop to take into work and rebuild whilst I was doing other things – after all everyone knows that 99% of the time you’re waiting around for installs to finish/updates to install anyway.  I generally reformat every 6-12 months just to keep my install clean, get rid of any crap leftover from apps that don’t uninstall properly and it just feels nice :p

I got to work this morning, booted from the Vista DVD, wiped the partition on the HDD and started the install.  Stage one went smoothly, got to the reboot, BSOD.  Great.

Most of the time, a BSOD on setup is hardware fault related.  I haven’t had the laptop 12 months yet so everything is still under warranty – still a pain in the arse though.  It’s not as easy as diagnosing a fault with a PC, the components are harder to remove for testing and they’re a bit meh. 

I decided to try again, got to the hard disk configuration page and my hard disks had switched.  Drive 1 was now listed as drive 0 and had 50gGB of space remaining, drive 1 now had 141GB remaining.  SHIT! I thought, I’ve wiped the wrong drive. 

Booted into repair mode, command prompt, went to D:, data was still there.  Decided to remove the drive with my backup on and zero the first one.  Took out the drive, tested the boot to make sure I’d removed the right one – straight into Windows.

Curiouser and Curiouser! /Alice

I’d also unplugged the mains cable.  I had a memory flashback to me plugging in the power supply and it sparking the 4-way.  Seems kinda daft now but it seemed relevant. 

Disk back in, PSU plugged back in, Windows was up.  Decided to install SP1.  Installed, rebooted, BSOD.

Fuck.

Removed the drive again, reinstalled vista, BSOD

Ran a memtest from the Vista DVD, no errors. 

Left the drive doing a full chkdsk whilst I went out for lunch, came back and watched it finish – no bad sectors, I was sure it wasn’t a HDD fault. 

What I couldn’t fathom out was that I was doing exactly the same thing I’d done three weeks ago, nothing had changed – I was still using the same installation media, everything was the same – there was no variable. 

Then I remembered – When I was on the Dell website looking for Drivers, I’d noticed a BIOS update and had installed it.  I wondered if it had done something to the mobo that vanilla Vista from Jan 2007 with no additional drivers couldn’t handle. 

Disabled AHCI and Turbo Caching mode on the HDD, booted into Windows, ran some tests, all good. 

Installed office, ran some windows updates, shut down and came to York. 

Booted back up here and it was still a little iffy (I’m guessing from having run the thing in AHCI mode and switching to native SATA) so decided to reinstall from scratch again. 

Vista went on first time, Office and various other apps installed without a problem, I’m 85% of the way through downloading 600MB of Windows/Office Updates. 

Absolute fucking ballache and one reason why it’s a bad idea to update your BIOS if you’re not having any problems with it :p

I found it extemely annoying because as far as I remembered there was no variable, nothing at all.  I guess the Windows updates between a base install and me installing the BIOS update meant that there were no issues for me three weeks ago. 

Ah well, at least it’s sorted now. 

It’s ironic because just before I started the reformat I was defending Vista to several workmates, an hour later I was cursing it