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Prior to moving down to Alexandria, my brother’s computer unexpectedly came back from Best Buy, so I had a chance to restore it back to normal instead of dumping the task on a friend.

Before pulling everything off the backup drive, I planned to start by running the Windows XP Professional upgrade. I booted the laptop and discovered the HP had used an updated drive image when they replaced the hard drive. The main difference was that the new image included a 60 day free trial of Norton AntiVirus 2005, whereas the original image hadn’t included any protection.

Sadly, the new drive image also included Windows XP Home SP 2, whereas my XP Professional upgrade was only SP 1. As I learned, Home SP 2 cannot be “upgraded” to Professional SP 1, so I had to wipe out the Windows installation and start from scratch. Bye-bye, virus protection.

I’m so happy Apple doesn’t pull this BS with OS X. There’s just normal OS X and OS X Server, with little reason to upgrade from one to the other. I suppose you could take a machine with 10.4 Client and revert it to 10.3 Server, but Apple’s Clean Install option seems to be better about not breaking programs than the comparable Windows installation option.

Once I got Windows “upgraded” to Professional SP 1 and applied the myriad of Windows updates, I reinstalled all the software. As I suspected, there were no problems with product activation.

Finally, I pulled all the Knoppix-salvaged data off the hard drive. The only catch I discovered during this process is that all the files on the backup drive were flagged as Read Only and this caused a few problems when I tried to access a few data files. Once I figured this out, most things just worked.

Knoppix is freaking brilliant.

There, I’ve said it.

My brother called me last night to say he could no longer launch IE and AIM on his HP laptop last night and he wanted to know whether I could take a look at it. Actually, he said it wasn’t working and he was bringing the laptop over to my apartment, but that’s beside the point. When I started working on the system, my first thought was “Just reboot.”

Blue screen. Uh-oh. Reboot into Safe Mode. Blue Screen. Uh-oh. Run BIOS Hard Drive test. “Read Failure.” Oh, crap.

I figured we were pretty much screwed at that point and I started thinking about how to salvage some of my brother’s content. At first, I was ready to borrow a 2.5″ drive to USB adapter from a friend, but then I remembered a former coworker raving about Knoppix allowed him to salvage somebody’s spyware-ridden PC.

I downloaded the latest ISO onto my PC laptop and burned it using the included burning software. For some reason, that resulted in a blank disc, so I downloaded the Nero 6 demo and followed the instructions for burning ISOs posted on LinuxISO.org — I wasn’t sure if there was anything special you needed to do burn bootable discs for Intel-based machines.

Along those same lines, does anybody know if Toast 6 Titanium will burn a bootable Intel CDs from an ISO? I didn’t feel like taking the time to find out.

Once I burned the CD, I decided to try it out on my PC laptop to get familiar with the environment before booting up the system with the flaky hard drive. I had to reconfigure the boot drive order of the laptop, but once I indicated it should try booting off a CD or DVD before trying the hard drive, pretty much everything worked fine.

When I plugged in my USB2 drive, the single partition just appeared on my desktop. Knoppix, however, didn’t recognize the HFS+ file system — no shock there. Using Disk Utility, I reformatted the drive as Unix Format (UFS, I assume), but Knoppix also failed to recognize this file system. Giving up, I booted back into Windows to reformat the drive as NTFS. I might’ve been able to format the drive from within Knoppix, but I didn’t bother trying. Knoppix was able to mount the drive and recognize the file system. However, I discovered that Knoppix (and apparently Linux in general) has trouble writing to NTFS partitions (don’t know if this is still accurate), so I flipped back to Windows, created a 20 GB partition on the drive, and formatted the partition at FAT32. Boot back into Knoppix, mount the drive, and make it writable.

Once I was satisfied about how to proceed, I shut down my PC and booted up the damaged computer.

I tried pulling a bit over 2 GB off the damaged drive and I was able to salvage all but 14 files of those that seemed important. 7 files were songs that I’ll grab off my brother’s iPod with PodWorks. The other 7 files were digital photos, 6 of which my brother posted to Webshots (think Flickr for college students, I guess).

Since this drive wouldn’t boot when I got it, I consider saving all but 1 file a definite victory.

Getting back to Knoppix, I was extremely impressed. It seemed to recognize everything except my widescreen display (I believe I saw that a standard screen resolution was selected) and the scrolling portion of my trackpad. I didn’t play with much beyond the file management, but I was able to run Konqueror, Mozilla, and OpenOffice. I wasn’t able to access my PowerBook over the network, but I’m not sure if I was doing it properly.

That said, I wouldn’t want to use Knoppix full-time. The UI’s a bit clunky and it eats up your CD/DVD drive (unless you install it on your hard drive, of course). As a rescue environment, though, it’s damn useful. For now, my Knoppix CD has a place in my toolkit. When I get a DVD burner, I plan on replacing my CD with a Knoppix 4.0 DVD — just in case.

There are two things I’d like to do before attempting something like this again, though. I’d rather connect the backup drive via a 4-6 pin FireWire cable because I suspect it’ll be faster than USB2 and because I have three FireWire drive interfaces and only a single USB2 drive interface. Also, I’d have a FAT32 partition ready to go instead of creating one as needed — if I’m trying to repair my only Windows system, it wouldn’t do any good for me to have a bunch of unreadable-by-Knoppix drives.

Fortunately, fixing the laptop doesn’t fall into my domain. When collecting my the assorted goodies that accompanied my brother’s laptop, I found the Best Buy extended warranty. When I dropped the system off and told the tech what I’d already checked, he simply said that he wasn’t going to bother testing it and he’d just send it back for service.

The only catch is the turnaround on service time — 9 days to 3 weeks. By the time the laptop gets back, I’ll probably be down in Virginia, so I’m trying to figure out how to get my brother’s laptop back to “normal.” If this info is accurate, simply replacing the hard drive shouldn’t be enough to cause product activation to fail, so installing the XP Professional upgrade, Office, and Publisher shouldn’t be problematic. My other concern is getting the backed-up data off the backup drive and back onto the laptop. Maybe I’ll try and find somebody around here who can handle it.

Engadget:

As expected, Netflix and TiVo are teaming up on a video-on-demand service…

Excellent. Netflix has already signed up Warner Brothers for the trial period. It looks like this thing is really coming together.

Matt Haughey:

Tomorrow’s Newsweek carries a story about a new Netflix/TiVo partnership that sounds perfect for anyone that has a subscription to both TiVo and Netflix.

OK, this is cool. I’ve been toying with the idea of getting Netflix once I move into my new apartment next week. If this is done right, it could pretty much seal the deal for me.

I realize you’d probably lose a few things by downloading the movies to you TiVo instead of popping in a DVD. It wouldn’t surprise me if all the DVD extras were missing. I think the audio options would be limited, since the TiVo only has stereo-out ports.

On the plus side, you wouldn’t have to worry about damaging or losing the DVD. Hopefully, I’d could also decide that I wanted to watch a flick when I get home from work and queue up the download so I could watch it when I get home (deities of bandwidth willing).

Like I said, this really needs to be done right if it’s going to work. Since TiVo currently offers web-based scheduling, I’d expect that you’d at least be able to queue up movies over the web. It would be really cool, though, if the process were completely integrated with Netflix — the TiVo web interface is certainly usable, but I’d rather use something like Netflix Freak.

I’m not the biggest fan of extended warranties, but sometimes they pay off. Oddly enough, I’ve had some of the best experiences with Best Buy, even though their name seems like an oxymoron at times.

Over the years, I’ve replaced both a car CD changer and a TiVo. Both times, I ended up getting newer models. Total cost of the replacement units was about $30 — the difference in price between the older CD change and the newer model.

Today, my brother got a new HP laptop at Best Buy to replace his slowly decaying ThinkPad. My parents drove to Danvers to pick it up and bought an extended warranty in the process.

(One gripe here — we ordered the laptop from BestBuy.com with in-store pickup at Saugus because the computer was listed as out of stock at every other local Best Buy location. Yet, when my parents drove to Saugus, the laptop was sold-out, but in stock at Danvers. I can understand a store having stock but not showing up online, but what’s the point of letting a customer reserve a product for pickup then not holding one for them?!? WTF?)

In general, I like the idea of extended warranties for laptops. You lug them pretty much everywhere and they have a tendency to get the crap kicked out of them. Certainly, I’ve gotten good use out of my AppleCare.

I don’t know how the Best Buy warranty will be in terms of getting repairs done (as opposed to replacement), but it really shines in one area — it covers batteries!

It looks like the HP batteries run about $100-150. With normal usage, it looks like the warranty could pay for itself without taking the laptop in for service a single time.

It’s been this way for about two weeks now, but TiVo has made the Home Media Option a part of the standard feature set for Series2 DVRs.

I reviewed the Home Media Option for ATPM slightly over a year ago (damn, where’s the time gone?!?) and not much has changed since then. The slide shows are still pretty basic. The promised AAC support hasn’t arrived. The integration with iTunes and iPhoto is still decent, though it would be cooler if you could sync your TiVo Desktop preferences with the sharing preferences built-in to the iLife applications.

Downside: I’ve gotten nothing new for the $100 I spent last year.

Upside:
1. If I can slip a wireless networking adapter on the back of my parent’s TiVo, I can probably impress the heck out of them.
2. If I buy another TiVo, it’s $50 I don’t have to spend.

Seems like I worthwhile tradeoff to me.

Anybody know what T-Mobile’s coverage is like in the eastern Massachusetts area? My contract’s nearly up with Verizon and I’m leaning towards switching providers so I can get a Bluetooth-enabled phone that’ll work with iSync.

The coverage map doesn’t look too bad, but then again, I also remember Sprint’s coverage map showing decent coverage around the Albany area when I was heading there for school. In the end, decent coverage turned out to be “sitting on the center cushion of the couch or sticking my head out the window.”

Theoretically, Verizon will have the Motorola V710 at some point, but from what I’ve read, they do a pretty decent job of locking down a lot of what you can do with Bluetooth.

I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a GameBoy Advance SP for a while now, but I’ve kept putting it off. I almost picked one up before a family trip to Vermont (no, I wasn’t driving), but the trip fell through and I never made it to the mall.

Currently, the limited edition GBA styled like an NES controller is catching my eye.

I wasted many hours of my youth in front of the NES, especially playing Legend of Zelda. Now, I can spend many hours of my semi-adult life recapturing my wasted youth

[via engadget]

Alright, I took the plunge. I ordered the S400 today. It should arrive before I got on vacation.

I swung by Best Buy on this evening to do a quick compare-and-contrast on the S50 and the S400. Compared to my 35 mm SLR, the S50 is small. Compared to the S50, the S400 is tiny.

I love my SLR, but often times I miss out on photos because I didn’t feel like carrying a large camera bag. I’m hoping that having a small digital camera will help break me of that habit.

I had it all figured out. I was going to buy a Canon S50. My parents have the S45 and it’s a nice camera to use. The S50 has gotten good reviews. I’d done the research. I was content with my decision.

Then I made the mistake of telling some of my coworkers about my idea during lunch. Something along the lines of “I rather have something more pocketable” was said.

Then I went out to dinner with a friend who was home from grad school. While we were waiting for our food, he pulled out his brand new bronze Canon SD10 Digital ELPH. It’s so tiny. And shiny.

Now I’m back to being confused. Do I want the larger, higher megapixel, more capable S50 or do I want something smaller? I like the looks of the SD10, but I’m put off by it’s lack of any optical zoom. However, I’m now trying to get my hands on Canon S400 Digital ELPH to see how it feels. The S400 has also been very well received.

Normally, I might just wait it out a bit because Canon is planning to roll out almost 20 new cameras in 2004 and I’m sure that batch will include a compact 5 megapixel camera that does basically everything I want. The catch is I’m going to Arizona with some friends at the end of the month and I really want a digital camera for the trip.

Anybody out there have any thoughts on my dilemma? I’d be interested in hearing some other folks’ take on this issue, either from the standpoint of bigger camera versus pocket camera or specifically S50 versus S400.