So after spending about 3 weeks futzing around with Solid State Drives, Vista and Windows 7, I think I have come to a set of truths that I have learned.

First, upgrading your operating system is a mistake, you should always install a new clean version of your operating system no matter what. You can find all the install codes you need for your software and you can figure out how to back up your data, and a clean install just fixes a myriad of problems and sins that have built up over the life of your previous operating system lifetime.

I managed to get a good size solid state drive, and I have learned that if you install your operating system correctly on the device, your system will run much better (if you are running Windows 7). I think putting an SSD on a Vista or XP system is just not worth doing (Windows 7 seems to understand the devices and optimizes to use it). You should run Windows 7 to use an SSD.

Attempting to Clone your disk to the SSD while it sounds like an interesting concept, is a bloody waste of your time. I ended up with a somewhat faster system, but, not as fast as when I simply reloaded the OS from scratch and loaded it onto a formatted SSD.

I am not sure what the lifetime of an SSD is, so you should have a reliable back up system for your important data (or better still have all your important data on a NAS or server elsewhere). This makes the system you are running on almost “disposable”, but it is much faster for now, and that is what you are looking for.

The system I upgraded was a POS HP Laptop, which was having no end of issues with Blue Screens of Death and overheating issues that seem to have subsided for now. As I have ranted previously HP laptops are not worth buying, and not worth buying at any price (I have had to replace 2 of them for my daughters), but if you stick an SSD in one, it might make it a bit more reliable (I we shall see).

All in all an interesting experiment, but if I had simply started from scratch as I was told to do by folks in the know, I wouldn’t have wasted 3 weeks the way I did.

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To my readers, and their families and anyone visiting here, I wish you a Merry Christmas and hope you enjoy the day and the season.

Christmas day and the whole Advent and Christmas season is a time to enjoy Spouses, Family, Friends and the time to relax.

And to you Scrapers, Spammers and SEO Spoofers, I hope Santa left you a lump of coal!

Merry Christmas

My Christmas Tree

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Hope all my readers have a Happy and Prosperous New Year. 

I promise to post more in the new year and have some plans for the Financial Blog including:

• Revamp the theme, it really does suck and is quite cluttered, but not sure which way I want to go with it right now. 
• Do some more investigations of blogging and SEO ideas to see if I can cross the threshold and start making some good money blogging. 
• Actually make some money on something other than Adsense!

Happy New Year!

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Dell Vostro and the Corrupt Vista BCD

This post is mostly a note page for me on how I fixed my wife’s DELL Vostro  1400.

This morning I woke up and tried to boot my wife’s Vostro and got a “Screen of Death” of sorts.

File: \Boot\BCD
Status: 0xc0000034
Info: The Windows Boot Configuration Data file is missing required information

In hindsight I suspect that Norton Anti-virus did something to the system, because the previous night Norton Anti-virus put up a note saying, “Doing stuff in the background”, and this morning the system was dead? Interesting coincidence at least.

Naturally I go to google and type in “Vista BCD Boot Fail” and found the following link:

Corrupt \Boot\BCD in Windows Vista

Which made me feel better, because at least someone was posting something about this issue. First thing it said I needed was a Vista Boot DVD, luckily I had my upgrade DVD (to Home Premium) so I was able to boot from it (after hitting F12 and choosing the DVD as the boot media).

The post above talked about recovering the boot track using a backup utility which I didn’t have, however it pointed to:

This useful Microsoft help page

Which outlined three fix procedures, all 3 of which failed miserably for me, but taught me a lot about how to debug windows, boot areas.

Frustrated I went back to Google and typed in: “Dell Vostro BCD Boot Fail” and found this:

The Real Answer from Microsoft Help

Which in fact outlines how to use bootrec, which fixes the boot record for the Windows Vista operating system.

The following steps are what I did exactly, after booting from the Vista boot DVD and choosing the command prompt:

Note If rebuilding the BCD does not resolve the startup issue, you can export and delete the BCD, and then run this option again. By doing this, you make sure that the BCD is completely rebuilt. To do this, type the following commands at the Windows RE command prompt:

• bcdedit /export C:\BCD_Backup
• c:
• cd boot
• attrib bcd -s -h -r
• ren c:\boot\bcd bcd.old
• bootrec /RebuildBcd

I rebooted after each command returned correctly and voila the system was back up.

Epilogue

Given I did a bunch of crap, including trying old restore points, I assume I have buggered up the system in some fashion or another, but we shall see there.

Norton came up and complained about being corrupted so I have reloaded it as well, and hopefully it will not do whatever it did last night to corrupt the BCD? Or whatever..

Sorry folks, needed to write this down, a little off topic, but useful to me.

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Very off topic for a this blog, very on topic for Thanksgiving.

The Greatest Turkey Story Ever Told

by Walter McInnis, excerpted from Thong-baked Cookies, all rights reserved to Walter McInnis, book is available from the author, contact me and he’ll sell you a copy, this is not the funniest story in the book either. Walter is a technical writer and project manager by trade but also lives an exciting and interesting life, this is the story of why we should buy all turkeys at the store.

Friends of ours own a hobby farm up around the corner from us. One of their hobbies was to raise a few turkeys for the oven. Only one survived to adulthood, and as he was growing they became attached to him. They would let him out and he would just follow them around the yard or sit quietly beside them on the steps. Their children became quite attached to him, and the mother just couldn’t picture him naked and golden brown on their dining room table. They could have just kept him except that he was already bigger than the kids, and they wanted to clean out the building they had him in to use as a machine shed, and no one wants to work on machinery while ankle deep in turkey guano.

So what to do? Well, fortunately they know someone who has no compunction about murdering helpless creatures, ripping their guts out, stripping them of their outer layers, and cooking and eating them. Namely, me. They call me and tell me that I can have the turkey to do with as I see fit, just don’t tell them about it. Suits me. So I head over one day mid-December to pick him up. “Pick him up” turns out to be impossible. He’s too frigging big. We’re talking big enough for a child to ride. Typically you feed turkeys regular food all summer and then put the high octane food to them just a short while before slaughter. But not this bird. He’s been getting the good stuff his whole life, and the result is that he’s too big to make him do anything he doesn’t want to. What he does want to do is eat continuously, so I lure him into the car with food. No problem.

As I drive back home I speculate on the pet possibilities for the kids. They could walk him around the block or take him to school for show and tell. Talk abut a unique pet! But I abandoned that possibility faster than an ugly woman the morning after (not that I would have any first-hand experience in that area). In the two minutes it took to drive him home, he shit on the back seat of my car three times! And if you have never experienced turkey guano, just go inhale a bottle of ammonia and you’ll get some slight idea of the smell, but without the chunky bits in yellow fluid.

So he won’t be a pet. Maybe I’ll keep him around for a few days just to show him to the neighbourhood kids. I put him in the garage and go in for dinner. I come out after dinner to check on him only to find that he’s been wandering the garage, as evidenced by the piles of frozen turkey crap that have bonded to the garage floor at 15-inch intervals! I go inside and start sharpening my knives.

The next morning my wife takes the kids out so they won’t be traumatized by seeing the gruesome details of how food actually gets to your table. I call up my buddy who grew up on a farm and who was made to kill chickens by the hundreds (and who won’t eat chicken anymore as a result) to see if he has any pointers. He says, “Just whack him over the head to stun him, and then he won’t give you any trouble while you kill and dress him.” No problem.

I go out to the garage and set up. It’s -25°C out so I dress warmly and keep the garage door shut to keep out the wind. In retrospect, it’s a good thing I did keep the door shut, else I would most probably had a visit of an official nature shortly afterwards. I set out my butchering board, a cleaver, a thin knife, a sharpening stone, and a camp stool. My plan is to stun him, and then hoist him into the rafters by the feet so I can bleed him into a bucket and prevent a big mess. So I throw a rope over the rafters and place a bucket handy. One last thing before I’m ready. I turn on the radio. All set. I pick up an iron snow shovel, good and heavy, and approach the bird.

CLANNNNNGGGGGGG!!!!!

The bird is stunned alright, lying on the cold asphalt and flapping feebly. I hog tie him and start the hoisting process. Now I’m no peewee (friends’ protestations to the contrary aside) but it was all I could do to get him high enough that his head was two inches off the floor. Not ideal, but enough to slip the bucket under him. Next step, I run the knife across his throat.

I guess the stunning blow I delivered was effective because he never even blinked, he just starting pumping blood into the bucket. I stand back and admire my handiwork. Everything was going according to plan.

Well, almost. The bird bleeds into the bucket for about two minutes and I’m figuring that it must be just about over. Just then he blinks. Then he blinks some more. Then he starts looking around and I can see that he’s starting to realize that, from his point of view, which is upside down, and obscured by a red haze, that things are not normal, and, in fact, pretty darn scary. And what do birds do when they get scared? They flap. And birds with four-foot wing spans can flap pretty darn hard. So he makes a few tentative flaps which causes him to start swaying back and forth. This in turn causes his head to bang into the sides of the bucket, which then tips over spilling all of the considerable volume of warm blood which had collected onto my garage floor. My mouth falls open as I watch this little two-inch wave of blood wash along the length of my garage, which is sloped just enough to facilitate a nice even spread. It being -25°C, this turns my once clean garage floor into a crimson skating rink inside of thirty seconds.

“Oh crap!” Suddenly I’m not so impressed with my accomplishment, and I’m more than a little pissed off with the friend who told me that stunning the bird would take care of everything. It’s not that I didn’t hit him hard enough. His head is imprinted on the shovel I used. I found out later from a professional that that technique doesn’t work with turkeys.

So I’m pissed off, but I guess I can handle it. Nothing ever goes perfectly. But things seldom go as totally wrong as the situation did just then. Not content with merely knocking over the bucket of his blood, the turkey starts flapping full bore. He’s so big and strong, even in his death throes, that I can’t get close enough to restrain him, and so he flaps like he’s making south for the winter. Tethered as he is by the feet, his flapping gets him spinning in circles, and in seconds he’s whipping around like a giant feathery centrifuge. This causes what blood remains in his body to come flying out of the slit in his throat and spray around the garage like a paint shop operator gone psycho. It splashes on the walls. It splashes on the snowblower. It splashes on the ceiling (yes the ceiling) and it splashes on me like a scene out of a cheap slasher movie. I can feel its sticky warmth congealing on my face.

The stupid bird does this two more times before finally succumbing, and I pause for a moment to try and remember why I agreed to this in the first place. Also, I swear a lot. If the kids had been here to see this, I’d have to re-mortgage the house to finance their therapy and I would end up living with a bunch of vegetarians (a fate worse than death [hanging from your feet in a cold garage notwithstanding]).
So here I have this dead animal hanging in my garage and not the least remnant of interest in completing the job. But I know that I must. And I do. I get him all cleaned up and take him into the house. Then I try to clean up the garage. Dried blood just doesn’t clean up very well (as many a convicted murderer will certainly tell you), and freeze-dried blood should be used to coat our tanks, ships, aircraft, and fighting men, because there’s nothing of this earth, or in any of the known galaxies, that will even touch it. I tell visitors that I dropped a can of paint while up in the rafters one day. Some of them believe me.

I give up and go back into the house to rinse off the bird and get him into the freezer. Midway through the doorbell rings. Probably someone looking for party tickets, my wife is on the social committee. I answer the door and there’s a guy there with a couple of kids. He looks at me for a second and then shakes himself and asks for tickets. I’ve forgotten where my wife told me the tickets were and so I’m scrambling around and running back and forth.

It still being brass-monkey cold out I tell the guy to bring his kids in where it’s warm. He declines. Suit yourself you masochist, but I’m sure your kids are thinking what a dork their father is for making them stand outside in the cold. I finally find the tickets and hand them over, take his money, and try to indulge in some small talk. The guy turns, and forcefully pushes his kids off the steps, down the walk, and away from the house. Anti-social.

As I turn back into the house and down the hallway I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror. Oh, My, GOD! I’d forgotten about the blood on my face. No wonder the guy wouldn’t come in.

Nobody else came to our house for party tickets.

Oh yeah. The bird was delicious.

What can I say after that, except, Happy Thanksgiving!

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For my Canadian Readers.

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So why did I have to learn this site from Askaninja.com ? Don’t my friends know my likes and dislikes?

Better still, why didn’t I think of this? Each of these videos has been viewed over a million times. That might help my readership a little.

The topic for today, how to use iLike to share music with your friends, making Apple scads of money by having folks buy crap on iTunes. I like the video, and that is enough, someone should make money figuring out how to get 3 lovely ladies dressed in French Maid outfits to hop around in a potato sack race, that is earning your pay!

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A Hello Kitty laptop computer? You know, someone got paid and possibly got a bonus for this idea. Read about this further at Silicon Valley Extra.

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I am not banned in China yet, but maybe after this posting, I can get banned there as well.

I watched PBS last night and Frontline had a feature on “The Tank Man” which reminded me of a few things in my life that I keep forgetting. Yesterday was the anniversary of this event.

I also have now added AuctionAds to Canadian Financial Advice as well. Another monetization in the right hand column which may add a few pennies to my pocket. I might even advise you to Try AuctionAds if I was a shameless Internet money grubber.

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