Sir Binbag Arises Part One

Out of the Darkness

A good few months ago R was picking her way through some rubbish tips and returned home with the base unit of a Dell Dimension 2350. I didn't know it was a 2350 and I hadn't named it as Binbag at that time.

There was some life in it but not much - it took a zillion years to boot and seemed unable to sustain its graphical interface for long. I was able to tell quite quickly that

1) It was running XP Home
2)Had multiple users
3)Had all those multiple users data
4)Was badly damaged in some way - either software or hardware or both.

After a few of these painful boots I thought that I would try and boot into a live Linux environment so I could root around the files. I inclined more to thinking it was malware related. Even when I couldn't open the CD Drive I thought it was malware (the previous owners were a family with a lot of teenage children - possibly a foster family). The bios was such that it couldn't boot from a USB drive either so I shelved the project hoping to salvage a few spare parts maybe when I had time.

I popped into Maplins and purchased their summer catalogue which inspired me to have another go at fixing Binbag. At the very least I could use the box and PSU and so on and build a new system up from there, motherboard and all.

I managed to boot into a reasonably usable Safe Mode after a few attempts as Administrator and ran dir/s/b in the command interface (cmd.exe). This listed every file on the C:\ Drive -there was a lot of music files in there. I was able to see that the C:\ drive was absolutely packed to the rim and maybe this was what was causing the problems. You're supposed to leave 20% free. After contemplating copying all this music I soon decided just to delete most of it all- there wasn't one artist I had heard off. I used cmd.exe again several times using del /s/b *.mp3 and del /s/b *.aac and all the other audio extensions I could think off. This deleted all the mp3s, aacs and so on. Cmd.exe is a very blunt but very powerful instrument.

It gave me a slight improvement in performance which allowed me to attach a flashdrive with HijackThis and Spybot. I was not knowledgeable enough to benefit from the HijackThis log but I could see problem areas. However Spybot performed admirably flagging up and fixing a whole bunch of scary looking Trojans. A much bigger improvement followed so I set about this anti-malware routine. I also went through Add/Remove Programs looking for anything that might have carried the malware (or be the malware). I cleansed the Temple.

One thing I grew to hate and one thing I liked - Macfee Security Suite (or don't know its proper name) I hated. It 's so vast and so all-consuming. It seemed hellbent on preventing me fixing the thing, for example sending me misleading messages when I used msconfig to remove unwanted startup programs. I wiped it out and installed Sunbelt Personal Firewall and AntiVir Anti-virus. Life got better.

Progress had been made. I will post my further struggles in due course including Microsoft licensing hell and its consequences.

Return from the dead

Thats nice SpeedTest has had a makeover.

There was a major outage in East London with Be - some third party destroyed one of the tunnels.

We are back on line now but I am wondering if this result is indicative of a problem? Its the first test I've done since the outage.

Being spending a lot of time with a found computer. It is Dell branded and the very handy Belarc advisor tells me it has a Dell Motherboard.

My conundrum is do I put it through Windows Genuine Advantage?

It has hotfixes but there is no Windows Defender and Media Player is version 10. It does have IE7 - but seing as it was practically dead from malware overdoses it is hard to know what is really what.

Another concern is the COA - it doesn't quite do what the MS site says it should do.

Otherwise I am very proud of my repair job (entirely software based - it will need a new CD drive which I intend to attempt next week).

wga anti-piracy dell malware coa

National Express WiFi

Well I certainly like it.

It's kept me amused with little tweets through a rather irksome journey round the country.

national express train uk
wifi

Now that's better

Virgin have apparently rolled out the 10 MB upgrade to 70% of customers so I expect it HASN'T got to Plumstead yet so. So I am definitely much better off without them. Virgin Media did send a bill which appears to state that they owe me money (much less than they do) but of course I haven't seen any refund yet. Thieves, no better than thieves.


broadband be unlimited virgin media

August Break-out

Things seem to have picked up a bit - could it be that there is less competition with people being on holiday. Who are my noisy "neighbours" I wonder?

Although speed is disappointing on a theorectical level its has no major impact on a practical one. And of course upload is consistently higher and isn't throttled if you exceed limits.

broadband be unlimited virgin media

Lapsing

What I mean by a linux diet is the belief that linux, or too much linux, is bad for you.

I was supposed to go on one just yesterday and did all right if it wasn't for the pesky ASUS Eeepc being so handy later on in the evening whilst slumped on the sofa.

And this morning I'm back on the big machine looking at f-spot again in forlorn search of a de-duping solution. Am I mad?

eeepc asus umpc laptop

No Soft spot for F-spot

AAAARGH. It was right back to the early days for me when I tried to de-dupe the f-spot digital photo-manager. It actually bled anxiety into my day to day life - and its not as if I don't have enough going round at the moment.

Unlike Picasa F-spot has a problem re-duplicating files when uploading- and this is despite them all being ordered by date in folders which I thought would be a bit of a clue.

Anyway decided to use some of my hard earnt command line knowledge to sort it out. Ha - hubris followed by nemesis. I used a command like this

find ~/Photos -iname "*-[23456789].jpg -exec rm {} \;

to locate and remove duplicates (I had found out that was how the system accounted for them by tagging number on the end of the file eg 5678.jpg would have duplicates of 5678-1.jpg 5678-2.jpg et cetera. And yes I did have up to nine duplicates of the same picture.

This worked great - so now I just needed to get rid of the thumbnails. So I selected all and "refreshed thumbnails" assuming they would delete themselves when they saw there was no original file left.

No such luck and it just became very frustrating and actually stressful as I mentioned.

The support seems so meagre - I mean user comprehensible support - and all the classic anti linux arguments sounded in my head. (How can gnome make this the default digital photo program?).

So today I am back on my linux diet and sticking to windows. After all I actually have something TO DO today.

Ha! So there Linux!

PS I just middle-clicked to paste the tags and nothing happened - ha! Windows!

f-spot fspot gnome ubuntu duplicates digital photography software