USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20011128.2231 (Crew, this is the Captain): Well, the struggle with Spica has gotten rather odd. I spent about three days setting up Win2K, and then I did a full backup of it onto a USB HD. (Actually, I had to do it twice. The first time the HD was FAT32 and I topped out the 4.2G file size limit. So I reformatted it as NTFS and then did it a second time.) So I can recover that setup when I want to. Having done that I ended up buying a copy of Win XP Pro, and installed that and started messing with it. I was never able to get DVD playback to work under Win2K, and I wanted to see if it worked in XP Pro. It doesn't. For reason which are not obvious, Media Player doesn't provide me with a "DVD Play" choice; it thinks that a DVD is a CD and only lets me see CD choices.

Which got me curious, so I restored the original XP Home onto the system. (Note that each of these involved repartitioning and reformatting the drive.) And indeed XP Home can play a DVD. It's most mysterious. So XP Pro is back on it, and maybe tomorrow I'm going to call HP's tech support and see if they can tell me why this doesn't work. Likely there's something I need to load, but I'm darned if I know what it might be. Whatever it is, it's not related to that mysterious device for which I couldn't find a Win2K driver, because there are no unsupported devices under XP Pro.

Having been impressed with how well that backup went to the 10G USB HD I own, I realized that this is really a very convenient way of doing backups. It's far more convenient than using CDs, and faster than using tapes. (And tapes and tape drives are not cheap.) So I went over to Fry's today and bought two new drives: one 80G USB2 drive for my desktop computer and a Firewire drive for the laptop. The desktop computer only has USB1 right now but USB2 is backward compatible, and it works fine, and when a reasonable USB2 card comes out I can upgrade. But the Firewire cable that came with the 60G doesn't fit the plug on my laptop; evidently Apple designed Firewire with two different cable connectors, for no obvious reason. (Likely they're electrically compatible, but they're physically incompatible.) So tomorrow I'll have to venture out again to some computer store and see if I can find an adaptor or a small-to-large cable instead of the large-to-large cable I have now. (The drive has the larger connector on it.)

It seems that no matter what I do, I have to make tradeoffs. But maybe not. For example, XP Home as provided with the system didn't have NetBEUI. But NetBEUI is available on the XP Pro disk, though the way it's installed is a bit unorthodox, and it may well also work on XP Home. I'm hoping I can get XP Pro to work, but if the only way I can get DVD playback and full features of the system is by going back to XP Home, that's what I will do. Sigh. (discuss)