Saturday, November 19, 2011
Computer problems and recovery
In college in the 1960s, we had to read some Kant, and people would make dumb jokes about words ending in "keit" so I coined "karmakeit" . I had done a few seemingly simple things with computers which had devastating and unforeseeable effects. One recent example was two old Dell XP Windows machines. On one I installed Microsoft Asian Language Fonts and pinyin input method so I could type Chinese characters. I had no idea that such an installation is IRREVERSIBLE and that the only precaution is to set a SYSTEM RESTORE POINT prior to installation so that you may roll back to that point and undo the installation. I contacted a helpful fellow called pinyinjoe.com who informed me of all these things. The install caused a minor annoying bug in that the mouse FREEZES several times a day and I have to unplug and replug the USB to fix it, so I can use the system but it is annoying. SO, on a second Dell XP, I set the restore point, installed Asian Fonts and pinyin, had even worse experiences, did the rollback, and the whole system died (became unusable). It was a very old machine and the 80 gig Seagate drive seems to have died so that might be coincidental. I purchased a 380 gig drive for $70, plugged it in and then did a free Ubuntu Linux install. I didnt feel like spending several hundred dollars for Windows XP. The only REAL safety with computers is to always have essential data backed up somewhere and always be prepared to REINSTALL the operating system and start from scratch. But it can take hours or days or even weeks to reinstall and configure everything that you want on your machine and configure drivers for printer/scanner/webcam, etc.
