After settling for 500MB less RAM and 90GB less hard drive space the laptop is back and stable.  Loading Windows, Office, and utilities, as well as updates and such took about what was expected.  The fun part was getting it all together so I could put things on the PC and get it to the point of doing something (besides take up desk space).  The speed and increased disk space have helped a lot, Windows loads much faster, many old issues were resolved, Movie Maker works again, and a few new ones cropped up, my onboard DVD will no longer read burned discs or write to them.

This post is for the reloading of the settings and installation of necessary tools and programs so I can begin to do real activities again.  As discussed earlier the device driver install went smooth, except for the Mashita DVD-RAM UJ-841S drive.  My IE 8 now works flawlessly, as does Media Player 11, before both were shaky at best and prone to hanging and crashing.  I can even sync my time with internet time, something I thought was due to China blocking the requests but now works!  I have gotten McAfee loaded and the firewall configures as well as tweeking the port settings to the laptop is more secure and using less resources then before.

Modifying the startup file is a must and I am consistently getting cold boots to task bar in less then 1:30 and reboots in just over a minute.  As I did a clean install I was more concerned with saving vital data and letting the rest get thrown out with the junk during formatting.  This was, and is, the next project.  As I gained an additional portable HDD, the old laptop drive, I now have nearly 1TB of storage, however the drives vary in age and run time so they are not to be 100% trusted.  I have separated the data by type to drive size, photos to the largest drive, audio and video to the second largest, the third largest is a back up file storage drive now, and the two smaller drives hold files and programs, one storing and the other backing it up.  Of course all of this has to be backed up on DVD, and that is why the second DVD burning drive came in.  It was a good choice to spend the extra $6 for burning because my main DVD drive is now just for reading DVD and CD-Rom as it can’t even read anything burned anymore.

So now that everything was backed up, it was time to burn to DVD, requiring more blank DVD’s, and then installing programs without going crazy and loading everything I own onto the laptop.  That is one problem people have with they move into someplace bigger, they want to fill it in with more stuff, see George Carlin’s comedy bit for that one.  Games are not so much my main focus now, digital darkroom, digital video processing (3 years worth), and being able to put it all together is what is the main goal now.  Thanks to being in China I can get free legal MP3’s from Google, so I will continue with what I can find there.  I will load a few games, but only 5 or 6 out of the 30 or so I brought here.  As the PC is faster it should be easier to get video from from the DV cam and edit it into something viewable.

For the most part getting things loaded was easy enough, just plop in a CD or download the latest program files and do the installs.  Patches had to be searched out and is much easier due to Google now days, over the old days of searching through message boards and tracking down the vendor sites.  I have not had the same issues I did with the video card software I did for my last build, just before coming to China.  I am missing some of the pre-loaded tools and programs, some are missed (DVD burning software, Toshiba diagnostics, DVD playing software) some is NOT missed (MS Works, AOL, and other pre-loaded bloatware manufacturers always find necessary to put on your PC for you.  I did have a copy of Roxio Easy CD and DVD burning software I got in Chicago on one of my business trips a couple of years ago.  One note, I have version 9 that includes Drag to Disc.  Drag to Disc conflicts with my RAM-DVD software for the Mashita drive that doesn’t work anymore.  From the Toshiba and other message boards it seems the drive has an issue where it just stops working for no reason, go figure.

I am not going to get in the dinking done (changing desktop, start menu, etc.) as that is just too boring.  So what is the conclusion?  Despite the set back of not getting the hardware desired I am satisfied with the increases in speed, storage space, and increased functions.  I will now have more excuses to lock myself in the home office on cold and rainy weekends to mix down digital video, process photos, and clean up may storage drives to make searching for and finding files easier.  I am still going to get the memory from the States, and get it sent with holiday packages, so I can at least get my 2GB of RAM with new chips and not the used 1GB chip I am currently using.  Laptops are a bit easier and harder to upgrade, easier as there are fewer options, harder as the parts are very specific and usually more expensive.  And that gets me to the back log of blog postings I have as nothing real was posted since the end of September other then progress on my PC rebuild.  I did not get a chance to keep myself fully updated on news or current events, but rest assured I will catch up quickly.  As we did not travel anywhere there are no great travel stories or pictures, but as I haven’t posted any photos in a while I will she what I can dig up, now that I work from the laptop directly and then save only the finished products.