Zindus

I started using thunderbird a few days back. Reason – well I kinda like the fell of an email client (got used to it in M$ – using outlook)… Outlook would be too slow on my old comp so using thunderbird… I used to use opera’s inbuilt mail client but the new versions seem to be causing the mail thinge to crash a lot… anyways I was happy for some time

Then I didnt know one of my friend’s email addresses (rather embarrassing). Then I got this addon – called zindus. It imports your gmail contacts to thunderbird. So, thats that. Use it.

I also got one more addon – “minimize to tray”. Needed coz the email client is supposed to stay open all the time. It will download an email as and when it comes and tell you about it

Comp to TV

I come home and have it all planned out…

I have a svideo out on my graphics card and a cute little connector which connects to this at one end and gives out composite, component and svideo at the other end… Now component cables were ridiculously expensive last time I checked, so I use composite cables (the yellow ones)

I connect this to my TV, and take a simple audio cable and connect the stereo jack to comp and the left and right RF cables to the TV… cool

Now the nvidia control panel starts

Advice
1. Dont clone the outputs – monitor and tv will have the same output, but monitor’s resolution will be drastically low (=TV)
2. Best bet – extended desktop with monitor as primary

This puts the wallpaper on the tv, but nothing else
Now there is an option to enable automatic fullscreen video on the tv for any video played on the monitor. DONT use this coz it scales the video and fits it to your TV screen – both horizontall and vertically.. so your widescreen videos end up looking bad…

The good thing to do is to not check the option like I mentioned before, but instead just play the video on the monitor. Now the fun thing is that since the tv is an extended desktop, you can drag the video window application into the tv space (it disappears from the monitor – taskbar icon remains)… now once its in the TV space, double click on it … tv fullscreen… monitor same old stuff – no video Excellent

Also, I got a bluetooth dongle and started to control this whole thing using my mobile phone Now that is fun

The fastest fix

So, I come back after having gone out to see that my comp loads the hiberfile.sys and then just stops… does this twice.. me bored… restart – delete restoration data and continue… Problem starts

Windows complains that system32/drivers/pci.sys is corrupt or not found. Asks me to put in the windows cd and repair

My first thought was that something might have gone wrong with the lan card… i had left the adsl modem on by mistake…

Anyways, lets play along… so i put in the windows cd… it doesnt even start loading files… goes to the starting blue screen and complains that some .c file caught an error… OMG… I am really bored to do this now

So, the next option was to boot into an old ubuntu install 7.10… stupid thing gives a kernel panic… the worst part being that the actual error is somewhere on top of the scrolled screen

Next, try ubuntu live cd (new version – relatively)… that thing goes to the first screen… then i ask it to go to live cd mode and it gives another kernel panic…

meanwhile i try out the lan cable with my laptop and after the first time – when it didnt work for some strange reason, the second time, it works

I google and see… the first result seems to have the exact same problem, but then i found that his cd issue was because it wasnt looking at the cd during the boot sequence…

I am bored again and just for the heck of it do a memory scan – ubuntu scan (this is after the recovery mode also gives a kernel panic)… now memory scan starts throwing up errors

Yet another thing is that the windows startup does three things
1. Pci error
2. Some anpnp or something like that error
3. Does nothing

So, I open up the comp… touch and push the pci lan card into its slot and do the same to the memory cards too

And then it just starts working

Oh well…

How to remove Vista Bootloader

It was fun…

It all started one year ago

I tried out iatkos a mac osx port for pc..
It installed its own darwin bootloader
It looked good… but I couldnt get sound to work
It had to go

My way of removing stuff – right click on disk… format.. BAD thing to do

Darwin goes away with the formatting, but apparently it overwrote my default Intel Boot manager or something like that… so my comp wouldnt boot now

Tried XP CD first… fixmbr fixboot…………… DIDNT WORK
Tried Ubuntu CD ………………………………….. DIDNT recognize XP
Tried Vista DVD …………………………………… FIXED (repair startup problems)… oh well back to normal work

Then, today morning, I get bored of VISTA… I am running out of HDD space… not using VISTA anyway, so need to remove… I put in the XP cd… fixmbr fixboot… comp gets screwed again – exactly like one year ago

So, I borrow a friend’s vista dvd (upgrade packs can also boot)… put it in… repair startup problems… restart… it outputs junk characters instead of starting … I am also hungry by this time.. .having coded a MEX implementation of DTW for 5 hours the previous night…(it had a 10x speed-up )

among the things I tried that didnt work
1. Default all options in BIOS
2. bootrec.exe from VISTA dvd /fixmbr and /fixboot
3. fixntfs -xp (If only I was in XP)

Finally, what did work was this

In the Vista (assuming d:)

D:\>cd Boot

D:\Boot\>bootsect /nt52 c:

C: was where XP was…

This did two things -
1. Fixed the bootloader
2. Removed Vista BCD bootloader and put XP

Aaah… what a fine day for (computer) science