Who knew…. July 13th, 2008
Who knew that my last post on an encrypted backup drive would be so timely. Last night while testing a piece of software something went horribly awry. One moment I was in my Windows partition working away and the next my laptop rebooted and informed me there was not bootable OS on my hard drive. PANIC!!! I had an Ubuntu Server Alternate CD on me so I popped that in and assessed the damage. It was not good. What used to be my NTFS partition for my Windows XP install was shown as an unknown and my boot partition was shown as free space. I honestly have no idea what happened. The good news is that I was able to use the Ubuntu CD recovery mode to validate that my encrypted LVM partitions were ok. Now I just have to figure out how to get everything pointing and booting it again. Most importantly though all my critical business information was on my 1 Gig CF card in my PC Card slot encrypted using TrueCrypt. So no real data loss just time and application install loss. So as of right now I am typing from my newly installed XP install setup the the way I like it and not how Dell likes it. Which means that it boots in less than 45 seconds and my wireless works at boot instead of 15 minutes later like it did in the default install. I will keep a running update as I dig through the rubble of my HD trying to figure out what happened.
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What on earth can I do with this stupid PC Card Slot… July 7th, 2008
So for the past two years I have been a Mac guy. I have fallen in love with the clean easy to use interface of OSX coupled with the power of the base os for when I need to get down and dirty on a network. Along with this love affair I had come the the conclusion that the days of portable computers bristling with ports and expansion slots like guns from battleships of old were gone. Then I switched jobs and was issued my Dell Lattitude D630. So far it is a nice laptop. Aside from the OS options I have ( I chose Ubuntu) I was surprised to see all my hardware options including a serial port (woohooo no need to care my keyspan USB adapter!!!!), a docking port slot ont he bottom, the ability to remove my DVD drive for a few extra hours of battery, 4 USB slots, VGA out on board, an a PCMCIA slot.
Lets just say out of all of those mentioned my PCMCIA (PC CARD) slot was my least favorite. Many computers are moving to the PC Express Cards that have much more bandwidth for options just out audio and video interfaces. So I just left my PC Card slot alone with the blank that had come in it. Some of the guys I work with are carrying super thin laser mice in that slot and my wife’s HP has a cool little remove that hides in that bay but all in all it seems pretty useless. That was till I found an old CF to PCMCIA apter that I had picked up to try to use CF cards in my older Cisco routers (That did not work!). Read the rest of this entry »
