Rating: 3/5
Selene, my trusty little IBM Thinkpad X22 died last wednesday. At first I thought it was Windows’ fault. It turned out later that it was the hard disk’s. I buy a new 40GB Seagate Momentus hard disk and what do I get? A catastrophic failure after just a few months’ use. Grrr. It’s a good thing I still have the original 20GB IBM Travelstar hard disk.
A hard disk failure is always a traumatic experience to me (and I’ve had quite a few). This is mainly because I don’t backup as diligently as others(?). I think about the gigabytes of data that can’t be recovered. Most of these is probably clutter and will probably be completely forgotten a few weeks later. But when you’re in the middle of the disaster you can’t help but feel this deep sense of loss :P But what has happened has happened and all you can really do is to pick up the pieces best you can and get things together and up again.
So I tried installing Linux Fedora Core 4. Wishing that this more robust operating system could save me from future grief. Although it was not Windows’ fault, I was thinking maybe it contributed >:) Besides, I’ve used Linux before. On my servers and, for one lengthy period, as a desktop OS. Unfortunately, things didn’t turn out the way I wanted them to. On my first attempt, a power management and hot-plugging wouldn’t work. I tried again with the same results. What’s a notebook without power management? I decided to give up on Linux (for the time being) and went back to Windows 2000.
After installing Windows 2000, I found out I didn’t have the drivers as the recovery partition was also trashed. Except one: for the Linksys WPC54G Wireless PCMCIA card. So I installed it and logged on to IBM/Lenovo to download the other drivers. I did a search and got a download link for a software installer which I promptly downloaded and ran. Lo and behold, it searched IBM/Lenovo for all the drivers and other software I need (and also those I don’t really need) and asked me which ones I want. I selected them all, started the download, and left it overnight. This morning the files were all waiting for me and with a click of a mouse button, they started installing. Pretty painless and quick. IBM/Lenovo rocks!
And thus my Thinkpad was reborn.
Rating: 4/5
Yesterday was a another whimsically declared holiday. For Metro Manila, that is. Is this part of Arroyo’s “holiday economics”? Supposedly, because it’s a long weekend, people would go out of town and therefore stimulate local tourism. Notwithstanding the fact that tourism sucks as a long-term industry, what about the potential production of all these people who are out of town (or more likely just malling since going out of town is becoming a rather expensive proposition)? Where’s the economics sense in that? Maybe, it’s part of a scheme to reduce the number of people in Metro Manila so that they won’t join the demonstrations (like most people still care). Or maybe I’m just too cynical. Maybe the government learned of a destabilization plot and they are just after the safety and well-being of the Metro Manila populace (who were probably out malling). Who knows?
One last thing. I know movies are commercialized but can’t they tone commercialization down a bit?!? The movies is peppered with 2-second brand exposures and it got kind of annoying. It even includes ones of MSN Search and XBox. M$!!! Maybe that’s why I was annoyed :P
Rating: 3/5