Miraculously (and mysteriously), my internal wireless adaptor started working yesterday. Unfortunately, that gives me one less excuse to return the laptop.
I still have to figure out what to do about Linux. Also, I’m unimpressed with Vista so far. Last night, the machine crawled almost to a halt. It’s a 2 GHz Turion with three gigs of RAM. It took forever for task manager to load, and it provided no information as to which process was causing the problem, but the CPU was saturated. I couldn’t even shut down applications, or the computer itself. I eventually had to just power it down. It’s been OK since I rebooted into safe mode, and then rebooted again, but I have no idea what was going on.
There was a comment in my previous post about my laptop problems that Vista doesn’t play well with others when it comes to dual boot. Could this be gotten around by booting Linux from a flash drive, or a CD?
[Update on Sunday morning]
How about a separate USB hard drive for the other OS?
Two problems (well, three, one of which is caused by the other). First, the integrated WLAN adaptor doesn’t seem to work. That’s an annoyance, but I have a USB adaptor. More seriously, it doesn’t seem to accept Linux. When I tried to do a Fedora 9 install, it hung on one of the devices. It didn’t occur to me to check to see if it was compatible with Linux–I had just assumed that it had evolved to the point where that wasn’t an issue any more. So I’m considering returning, but not sure how to avoid the problem in the future.
Oh, the third problem? It comes with Vista installed. I hadn’t cared when I thought that it would running Linux most of the time, but now it’s an issue.
Two problems (well, three, one of which is caused by the other). First, the integrated WLAN adaptor doesn’t seem to work. That’s an annoyance, but I have a USB adaptor. More seriously, it doesn’t seem to accept Linux. When I tried to do a Fedora 9 install, it hung on one of the devices. It didn’t occur to me to check to see if it was compatible with Linux–I had just assumed that it had evolved to the point where that wasn’t an issue any more. So I’m considering returning, but not sure how to avoid the problem in the future.
Oh, the third problem? It comes with Vista installed. I hadn’t cared when I thought that it would running Linux most of the time, but now it’s an issue.
A 5.8 in the Chino Hills. Hope our house in Redondo Beach is all right. I suspect it is–it’s about forty miles away. I just hope it’s not a foreshock of something bigger.
[Update a few minutes later]
Let me be the first to say that it’s Bush’s fault. Or some fault out there…
And I expect Al Gore to blame global warming any minute.
[Update at 3:35 PM EDT]
Now I’m hearing that it’s been downgraded to a 5.4.
Health officials for years have advised against eating the tomalley, the lobster liver some regard as a delicacy. The Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention reiterated its advisory Friday, however, after some lobster livers tested positive for high levels of toxins caused by large blooms of red tide algae.
No problemo for me. I’ll stick with the meat, as I always have.
We’ve had four named storms already, and it’s not August yet (and a good chance for one or two more before it is). That may mean a busy season. I just hope that southeast Florida isn’t in the bore sights. We’ve gotten off easy the last two years.
Condolences to friends, family and colleagues of Tony Snow. I wonder if major television news people die in threes as well? Unlike Russert, this wasn’t as unexpected–he had been fighting the cancer for a long time, and his mother died of it. But I hadn’t been aware that he was near the end.
[Update in the evening]
Mark Steyn has a short tribute (not to imply that many others don’t, and I suspect that he’ll have a longer one in due time). This is a very interesting point politically:
He had a rare temperament in today’s politics, and the Administration might have been spared the vicissitudes of these last five years had he become press secretary earlier.
Yes, of the many failings of George W. Bush, one of them is loyalty to previous staff. Scott McClellan was completely out of his element as WH spokesman, yet he was allowed to blunder through during many of the worst years of the administration. Things might have gone much differently had Tony Snow been brought in earlier. He would have challenged much of the nonsense that the press was putting forward much earlier, without looking like a deer in the headlights. It just shows how important perception can be.
It’s very hard to come up with anything negative about Tony Snow, though I’m sure that one or two of my regular commenters will make the attempt in the service of their vile political agendas. I hope that I’m wrong.