The Block

I’m suffering a little with writers block at the moment, I’ve been wanting to sit down and write a post for the last couple of days but my head isn’t quite “in the zone” for doing such a thing.  So here is a rather random stream of consciousness post about what has been going on of late.

The controls in the Resident Evil 5 demo are incredibly frustrating. RE4 was a classic, but the genre has moved on and while RE5 is a very beautiful game after playing through the two scenarios in the trial yesterday afternoon, I am very seriously considering not buying the game when it launches to pay full price.  That makes me sad.

The new Knight Rider is probably about to get cancelled when the format finally changed and it is now a pretty decent show.  I had five episodes stacked up on the DVR and watched all of them on a very wet Sunday afternoon, and the format change from being absolutely ridiculous to the right kind of daft, but fun show it should be.  After those I dug out the original 1982 TV movie (to be found on disc six of the series one box set) and had a great laugh at the Hoff and his crazy expressions, the sheer cheeziness of the thing and how after over twenty five years it is still good fun.  The new show may be about to be driven off to the scrap yard, but at least we got Peter Cullen back to voice KARR.

Prison Break got cancelled, it’s been a long time coming but Fox finally saw sense and decided that the final block of six episodes due to be shown in April will conclude the four season show.  As with Knight Rider, I had a stack of episodes to watch (eight in total, of which I watched five yesterday) and doing them back to back is the best way to enjoy a show like this.  I can see why some people wait until a series has finished and then buy the DVD box set.  Yes the show went on for too long, but at least this last season was better than the Sona prison from last year.

Last week I had to deal with a computer at work which reminded me just how slow and frustrating old kit can be.  There are a couple of computers that are made available to staff to get online with during their breaks, as nobody bar a select few have access to the internet on their machines.
The link is separate from the corporate network, so they can go anywhere and do whatever they like.  These two computers are also the slowest in the building, years old and ones that don’t get the regular TLC that the regular desktop and notebook machines do.  There was a problem with one of the computers so I dragged it into the office to take a look at.  It was a regularly simple problem but the thing hadn’t been patched or updated for way over a year.  It was running XP SP2, IE6 and had a six, yes six gigabyte hard drive.  Oh and a Pentium II processor (Collin if you are reading this it was a GX1, remember those!).
I’m a big fan of ensuring that computers are fully patched and up to date so the mission was simple.  The word simple or straightforward should never be used in relation to an IT matter.  Learn this.

I had to get a spyware and AV sweep run, upgrade to XP SP3, ramp up Internet Explorer to version 7, get all the Microsoft patches installed and for good measure upgrade Skype, Windows Live Messenger, Acrobat Reader and Flash to the latest versions.  Simple right?
It took three days.  Not three solid days of work of course, but I first put the machine on the bench on Tuesday morning at 9, and it went back to the staff room on Wednesday around midday.

For extra added fun, imagine trying to install XP SP3, to be told there isn’t enough hard drive space to extra the service pack files in the first place, and they had to be extracted onto my USB hard drive.  Oh and the machine had USB 1 ports on it, and set a new record of taking three hours to install SP3.
I used all of the tricks and tools in the arsenal, including CCleaner and stripping out the service pack file cache to eventually claw back enough space to get the thing working correctly again.  Frustrating yes, but it’s always good to serve as a reminder that our current generation of hardware is way more powerful than that of yesteryear.

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Category: General