The Grand Experiment Succeeds!

Baia dos Porcos, Brazil

I must start off by apologizing for the lack of a post yesterday, however I was deep off into the conversion of my PC into its optimal configuration and did not finish in time to get something posted. In fact, Picasa2 is still re-indexing my some 77,725 photographs and is not quite ready to upload to blogger while I am doing multiple things like talk on Skype, type, reindex Picasa and chat on messenger all at the same time. so maybe I am trying to push the envelope to test the limits of my new platform. I was having some issues with time when I was creating zip files and uploading them to a file storage service, the largest upload failed at 99% after 12 hours. So I was discussing the logistics of the situation with my buddy, Scruffy, who is a long term resident here at the hotel and has his masters degree in geek wizardry from the school of hard knocks. It suddenly occurred to him that he had a spare hard drive at his place that I could use to save my files on then I could mirror my C onto my D allowing me to replace my 20GB C drive with a 100GB C drive that used to be D. To accomplish this we disconnected my DVD burner and hooked the third hard drive in to that cable. Then we had to discover which jumper went where on which drive so that all their various dialects translated into Dell's Russian dialect so that a coordinated effort could be put forth. Once we solved that little mystery then I began copying my photos and videos to that third hard drive which too about an hour all told. It was now time to test the advertising promise of DriveImage XML to allow the direct copying of one drive to another in mirror image while the originating disk is also running the operating system. It work flawlessly in less than one hour to complete an accurate, bootable volume on my D drive that was an exact duplicate of my C drive. We then unhooked the original C drive, replaced it with the old D drive (which is actually newer, faster, larger) then tried to boot up. It was another game of discovery with the jumpers before it would boot, but everything was there except the webshots software which I had deleted before hand so I could download the latest version after the conversion. I saved all the data files and upon the reinstall I have all the webshots I had with the latest version of their software. Webshots is where I get most of my travel type photos I use at the head of a post and is a great addition to any desktop. All I had to do was reload the photos and videos onto the new C drive from the temp drive and I would have everything all in one place. It again took me about an hour to copy the files to the new C drive and then I disconnected the temp drive then played another game of guess the jumper setting for a stand alone drive. Once we got that one figured out, voila the event window blossomed and liftoff was achieved.

Now the difference in performance between 512 MB and 2 GB of ram with my processor is really amazing. I can multitask at will, pages load in a flash, photos snap into view and there does not seem to be much that I can do to phase this platform. I was telling Will it was like buying a car from an estate sale that is covered with a tarp that resembles a VW Beetle. It is delivered to your home where you remove the cover and you find yourself the proud owner of a Porche Carrera. With the lesser amount of memory, Photoshop 7 took forever to load. I hit the quick start button and it popped up in milliseconds ready to go. It almost feels like I have a rocket propelled platform from which to launch my various diatribes, videos and eye candy for your edification. To say that Uncle Gerry is somewhere in the region of cumming all over himself with ecstasy at the performance level which he has found himself the possesor of would be really fucking accurate. I have never befor had this much personal computing power at my disposal much less in my possesion and I think I am going to like the experience very much.

Now I have been trying to wait for Picasa to finish its reoreintation but time is running out and the bed is calling to me from the other side of the room. While typing this up I have been haveing a conference call with Will and some others up in Omaha and they sparked an idea that seems to fit as a solution here. Every photo I have posted on Nichevo is in a web album at my Picasa page which is set to private (email me for an invite) so I thought I would embed a slide show of vintage Nichevo photography from September of 2007 which is posted just below. Until next time as always, Enjoy!