April 30th, 2006 by Jemaleddin Cole

Last week I cleared off my PC and gave it to Jared, and as part of that, I had to stop using Picasa for my pho­to­blog. Since I bought a Flickr pro account last month, I decided to move all of the pic­tures I had been host­ing there, and am now redi­rect­ing all traf­fic from the old site to my Flickr photostream.

I also uploaded a bunch of older photos that turned up when I was clean­ing off my hard drive, and have one new set of Jared and Sierra at the play­ground and an old set of Jared at school. This knocks my care­fully main­tained ratio of pic­tures of my kids way over to the Jared side, but I’m sure Sierra will catch up.

So far I’m not miss­ing my old PC: the process of tran­si­tion­ing it to Jared just about killed me. Win­dows decided that if I was going to change the mouse, key­board and dis­play, it wasn’t going to rec­og­nize the inte­grated sound any­more. The only way to fix it was to buy a new one. It also appears that Windows’ USB driver only rec­og­nizes Jared’s mouse and key­board if they’re in spe­cific ports. Really. Luck­ily the mouse only works in the port under­neath the key­board PS2 port, and vice versa, so that’ll be easy to remember.

Mean­while, I’ve been very impressed with the way my Mac mini han­dled the same process. Switch­ing from VGA cables connnected to a KVM to DVI cables directly attached to the mon­i­tor? No need to turn every­thing off and reboot 14 times: just switch out the plugs and every­thing works. And now that I no longer have to use a DVI-​to-​VGA con­verter for the sake of my Win­dows box, the screen is brighter and crisper than ever.

The other half of the Win­dows Night­mare was deal­ing with how poorly Win­dows XP han­dles user per­mis­sions. I started Jared out with a lim­ited account, and had to install all 20 of his video games as an admin­is­tra­tor. Log­ging in as Jared revealed that many of them needed to be installed again as Jared to make changes to HKCU. And then we dis­cov­ered that IE wouldn’t let his account install or even run cer­tain 3D ActiveX plu­g­ins. Jared now has an admin­is­tra­tor account just so I don’t have to wander over every 20 min­utes to trou­bleshoot per­mis­sions prob­lems. Aren’t we glad that Vista will make this even more annoying?

Of course this has its own prob­lems as Jared down­loaded and installed 4 pro­grams within 2 hours of being made an admin. They’re all share­ware and stopped work­ing after 3 or 4 ses­sions, and he woke up this morn­ing pissed. Luck­ily, at the way he’s pro­gress­ing, he’ll prob­a­bly be down­load­ing seri­alz and cracks for them by next week. Maybe I should start teach­ing him Russ­ian now.

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