Tag: Tech Stuff

OK, I just upgraded to Firefox 3.6, from 3.5.8. It’s still the same, mostly, except one change that I have noticed is that tabs no longer open left to right in the order that you open them, across the top. Instead, tabs open left to right in the order opened, starting immediately to the right of the tab from which you opened them. This is going to take a bit of getting used to.

(In other words: if you have two tabs open, Tab #1 on the left and Tab #2 on the right, when you open a link from Tab #1 in a new tab, Tab #3 will appear to the right of Tab #2. Now, Tab #2 gets shifted over to become Tab #3, making Tab #2 the one you’ve just opened from Tab #1. I can see the logic for this, but it’s one of those differences that’s just different enough to frustrate for a little while.)

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I know that a lot of folks have had problems galore with Windows Vista, but it’s never given me any major headaches. One thing it does that vexes, though, is that it seems to every so often reassign drive letters to USB storage devices I plug in, after long periods of those devices having the same letter.

I always discover that this has happened when I try to open a file I’ve been working on. For “ephemeral” writings of mine — that is, blog posts, mostly — I write a lot of my longer pieces in OpenOffice rather than Blogger’s posting interface, and then, when finished, I just copy-and-paste the content into Blogger and hit “publish”. For posts like book or movie reviews, I have files on the thumb drive I use most often called “Recent Reading” and “Recent Movie Watching”, and I just write away in those files. (Same thing with “Fixing the Prequels”, and with other longer posts on any number of topics, which I write in a constantly changing file called simply “Posts”.) So, every so often, I’ll just go under my Start menu to recent documents and click the one I want to write more into, and it’ll open up nicely…unless the computer has recently reassigned my main flash drive’s letter, in which case I get the fun error message, “File G:DocumentsEssaysByzantiumShoresWhyPieThrowingIsCool.odt does not exist.” So then I have to go through and open the file using the file-browsing dialogue box, discovering that my flash drive which has been the G: drive for two or three months is now the F: drive.

No, it’s not the biggest issue in the world, at least with opening those files. With maintaining my music library in Windows Media Player, however, it’s a total pain in the ass.

A while back, I decided to remove just about all of my music files from my computer’s hard drive and put them on a 250GB external hard drive. (I’ve since even bought a second EHD that’s 320GB; this I use purely for backup.) My “main” EHD, the 250GB one, is the one I use most often, and I actually have it over ninety percent full right now (although the big majority of that is actually movies and teevee shows I’ve put on it). The music takes up just under 55GB, which is why I wanted to get it off my main hard drive; I try to keep my main computer drive no more than one-third full at any time.

OK. So, when I moved all of that music over to the EHD, I had to add another location to Windows Media Player’s library function. At the time, the EHD was my F: drive, and it remained my F: drive for months — in fact, it was even more than a year. No problem. I’d rip a CD, move the files over to the EHD, and WMP would take care of everything.

Until, on fine day, I launched WMP and found that almost none of my library would play, because the computer had that day decided that my EHD, which had forever been the F: drive, was now the H: drive. So I set up WMP to scan the H: drive as well for library files, which it did, but it then had to go and clean itself up and remove its pointers to the F: files it could no longer find. This took quite a while, as we’re talking about removing pointers to several thousand files.

And now, guess what — it just did it to me again. My EHD is suddenly and inexplicably back to being my F: drive! So again, WMP has to go an completely reindex itself.

My question is, after a long-winded post, highly obvious: Is there a way in Vista to permanently assign a letter to a drive?

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OK, folks, here’s what’s going on with The Main Computer here at Casa Jaquandor. I think I’ve written about this before.

Some time ago I replaced the CPU cooling fan, because the original one was rattling. Problem solved…except shortly thereafter, the computer started doing this thing where the case fan (our computer only has one case fan) would sometimes rev up to full speed, becoming very loud. It tended to do this in times of heavy load, such as during some of The Daughter’s games and when we’d use a screensaver that uses the 3D graphics that our graphics card generates.

However, the problem got worse until the computer started randomly rebooting suddenly, often in the middle of one of the kid’s games. This rendered many of her favorite games (Wizard 101 being the biggie here) unplayable. After researching, I concluded that the problem was the power supply, which I replaced last week. Unfortunately, the problems continued, which leads me to believe that the power supply wasn’t a problem at all. Oh well; now I own a 650-watt power supply.

Doing further research, my current hypothesis is that the CPU is getting too hot when under heavy load like that and shutting down to protect itself. Fair enough, except I’d installed that nifty new CPU cooler that was working just fine. But, it turned out that I never replaced the thermal conductive grease that you’re supposed to apply between the CPU and the cooler. So I got a tube of that stuff (it’s only ten bucks), applied it, and then got the computer running.

The news was a bit encouraging, in that The Kid was able to play Wizard 101 for about thirty minutes before it caused the computer to reboot. In the meantime, the case fan was revved up to its full — and loud — speed the entire time she played. This leads me to believe that my working hypothesis involving CPU overheating is correct, but I’m unsure about how to proceed. I did read somewhere that thermal greases take a little time to “burn in”, so they’re not as conductive at first as they are after a while in position, so maybe the problem will go away? Or do I need to figure out some other way to further cool the thing? I know that case fans aren’t expensive, but I’m unsure as to where I’d install one, as the back of the computer only seems to have an opening for one fan.

The other wrinkle is that a secondary problem has opened up: some important file has apparently become corrupted in such a way that the computer’s optical disk drive no longer works. This is, obviously, bad, and I’m not sure of any way to address this other than simply reinstalling Windows. That would be more of a nuisance than anything — I keep our content backed up religiously — but I’m wondering if there’s any chance that reinstalling Windows might help out the heating problem as well.

Does any of this make sense to any techies out there? Or am I chasing wild geese and would be better off just turning the machine over to the Geek Squad?

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(I’m going to be keeping this post at the top of the page through the rest of Sunday. Newer content will appear beneath it, later on.)

I posed this question on Facebook, and I thought I’d throw it up over here as well, since not everyone who reads me here is over there.

Basically, my laptop — nearly two years old — has worn out its battery. (No, not its welcome! Just its battery.) The battery still charges, but its full charge now lasts less than an hour, which means that it’s time for me to investigate a new battery. All well and good.

Now, this machine is a Dell Inspiron, and the Battery Life meter makes the bold claim that I should only use Dell batteries and nothing else. And of course, Dell batteries are only available through Dell. But I’ve found some third-party batteries available out there, for quite a bit less money than the Dell ones, so I’m wondering: are there any actual consequences to using a third-party battery, or is it OK to do so? Such as, are Dell machines specifically set up to only charge Dell batteries, so if I get a different brand, is there a possibility that the thing doesn’t charge?

Also, a respondent over there — Sean, actually — tells me that he believes usage of a battery while a laptop is plugged into the AC outlet tends to shorten a battery’s lifespan, and my best bet is to get the new battery and then only use it for when I’m actually in need of battery power, and use the old one when I’m plugged into the wall. (In truth, I’m plugged in more than ninety percent of the time, anyway, when I use the laptop.) Is this the case? I figure if I get a new battery and get about three years out of it, by that time I’ll be in the market for a new laptop anyway. (This machine is working just fine, with just a couple of hiccups that are so minor I barely notice them anymore.)

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