Doing things with and to a computer, just for the hell of it...

If you're wondering about my Windows Technical Preview testing, that came to a screeching halt when it screwed up the sound the other morning. I trashed it with a format of its partition - and then it came back from a backup file. So it took a little doing, but I got rid of it. In the process, I created a new partition on the drive, resized two others, and then merged two into one, to end up with the original three, but differently assigned now. 

Windows 7 is still the first, and has the boot sector. Then comes PC-BSD in the second partition, followed by Windows 8 in the two-merged-into-one partition at the far end. It's been a nerve-wracking day or two, but I know now what I can do to a computer, and still have it completely functional when I'm done.... and this is a far cry from when I first began in 2004, and was panic-stricken at the sight of the old "Blue Screen of Death". The way to overcome your nervousness about a computer is to just roll up your sleeves and have at it, and let it go to hell if it likes, and then reinstall everything, refresh the boot sector (or rewrite it) and get everything back to normal again. 

So now, both computers have the same three operating systems - Windows 7, PC-BSD, and Windows 8 Pro. And it anything happens to the system on one, I can use the similar system on the other to figure out why, and fix it. Everybody should have two computers. And six operating systems. You can stay fairly active, just keeping everything updated, and scanned and defragmented, and filed in its proper places..... 

And lest you think I only bitch about Windows, PC-BSD isn't perfect either. It displays at correct resolution on the PC with an ATI Radeon graphics card, but its same version on the PC with an Nvidia graphics card displays what it calls its correct resolution in such a small size, printing can hardly be read even using my newest prescription glasses plus a magnifier. And apparently, the only cure is to hack the code and install a special bastardized version of its Nvidia driver. And I don't want to mess with the graphics card driver, because I already have its latest version installed, and it works fine with the two flavors of Windows it also works with on this computer. 

And if the graphics card and its latest driver works fine in two different Windows systems, why the hell won't it also display its normal resolution in PC-BSD? That's got me baffled.... and nothing's perfect, Kiddies. Absolutely nothing.