04-Jan-2009

Irene re-thought
Irene, the Intel system that is used by the family members to access the Internet (and do a lot of other things) has been working, abait slow, for a number of years now. However, performance was gradually decreasing and so this was the moment to take a look. I found the original purchase papers, that learned the system is based on a MSI motherboard, featuring an ADM processor and 256 Mb of memory. Three disks, as it turned out: 80, 14 and 8 Gb. Enough, I think, for the type of usage.
Biggest problem is the lack of memory. 256 Mb – with 64 shared with the built-in video card, means 192 for Windows XP professional – way too many for a reasonable performance.
What I have to do anyway is add memory – but that’s hard to get on a Sunday 🙂
So the first hit is to add a graphical card and do not use the built-in. I do have an AGP-based card that should work – but it was found it didn’t work properly, the monitor falls into power-save mode annd could not be taken out of it. So that was not a solution.
Next, I minimised the size of the shared memory. It may limit the video in speed and facilities but it works.
Next, I moved all files on the 14 Gb disk to the 80Gb one – there is enough space to accommodate all that’s on the system. Especially after removeing all files that are no longer needed. The pagefile and the Internet caches have been moved to the 8Gb disk, and that concludes the Windows-XP installation.
The 14Gb disk now holds an Ubuntu installation, that my family may use – once it’s properly setup and explained.
Software problems solved
On Aphrodite, my main workstation, some software simply failed to work properly all of a sudden, without a real reason. Or I may have cleaned the registry a bit too rigorous. I mailed the problem to the supplier and he canme up with a typical Windows solution: Remove it all – inclusing hacking the registry – and re-install. It looks like it did the trick. Now I can add the latest tracks…