Acer Aspire One D255 - To Linux and Back Again

Having done sterling work for a year or so, my faithful little Acer Netbook was slowing to a crawl. No blame on the hardware, it's Windows innit? Seven versions in and it STILL needs reinstalling every now and then. Why, for goodness sake? Anyway...

But I'd read a magazine article about how Linux can transform the performance of a netbook, so what the heck, I thought I'd give it a go. Fortunately I'm immortal, so losing a few days from my life won't matter, will it?

Oh, if you want to you can read a post I did a while back about the lil' Acer, here.

So I had a surf around and the wisdom seemed to be that Linux Mint would be a good choice. I experimented by making a bootable Mint DVD and running the netbook off that, just to see what would happen. Well... it mostly worked, but you couldn't tell about speed in that configuration.

The install of Mint went smoothly, and was quite quick, so far so good. But there were problems to come. The webcam wouldn't work with Skype. The microphone wouldn't work at all. Only one speaker worked. But above all, the battery life plummeted. It more or less halved, and the poor little Acer got very hot underneath. Some of these issues I may have been able to resolve given enough time, but to be honest I was put off when frequently the advice on forums was to open up a Terminal window and type stuff in that made no sense. Come on... Linux, are you serious? That's like going back in time to Windows 98... maybe even before. I gave it a day or too, but enough was enough. Admittedly it did indeed seem slightly more sprightly, but not fantastically so. So... back to Windows 7. This was where then 'fun' started.

Now I could bore you with how tricky it was to get Windows 7 back onto this netbook, but instead I'll just say this. Despite being in the computing industry since 1975 I am still amazed at how unutterably crap some programmers are - there is little excuse for the litany of stupid problems I faced trying to do something that should have been easy. I had gone to the trouble and expense of buying a USB DVD drive, and making the restore DVDs as per Acer's instructions, so it should be easy, right?

I'll give you an example - this was after I had spent a lot of time just getting the Acer to the point where I could run the restore. So, I was restoring Windows 7 using the Acer recovery disks. It got stuck on step 37 out of 40 something. There was no way around this, as the twerp who programmed this routine made sure as soon as you swapped out to Windows (which was there, working okay 'underneath'), you were flicked back to his full page recovery program... with just a glimpse of the underlying desktop before you got back. Well duh. Rebooting didn't help, as it just went back to where it was, stuck.

The cure for this, which I thought of myself but dismissed as insane, but then I found another poor sap had achieved and recommended, was to get the task manager up using Ctrl-Alt-Del, and then try to click on that window in the millisecond you had before returning to being stuck. I had to get the mouse just in the right place to be ready to click, then swap and click really fast. It took me 20 minutes, but eventually I managed to kill the recovery process. Looking back I can't believe I sat there and did it, but there was no other way.

In the end I got it back working under Windows 7, and its performance is once more acceptable. This time next year when it starts slowing up again, maybe I'll just bin it!

To conclude then, Linux has failed to win me over, and Windows largely sucks, so one is a bit stuck, isn't one? One thing I might try... forget Linux and newish Windows, how about XP. Ah yes. An operating system I actually quite liked, and that worked. Have you tried Windows 8? Ugh.

Four IT Gripes...

Just to get things off my chest... four IT related gripes, knowing these things just might help you.

Much as I like 1&1 hosting - unlike Fasthosts I've never had ANY trouble with them at all - I do find their documentation and Help service is a little lacking from time to time.

I was recently asked to set up a simple contact form on a web site, and looking throught the 1&1 help files, there was a lengthy explanation of how to use FormMail, a public domain bit of Perl code that would do the job with minimum effort.

Except... having spent quite a lot of time messing about with it, I couldn't get it to work. Much head scratching and searching through help files later, I finally cracked the reason. It wasn't my stupidity or a software glitch, or finger trouble or anything like that - it was simply that the account I was trying to get this working on was the cheapest 'Starter' flavour... and it turns out that it didn't support Perl scripting. Arggghhh. This is made a somewhat obscure shortcoming, you have to delve deep into the hosting features to spot this, and at no point did the documentation about how to implement FormMail mention this. Another hour of my life I'll never get back. (I ended up writing myself a PHP script, the results of which are a lot better, IMHO.)

A few months ago I purchased a Seagate Freeagent Goflex Desk 1TB USB drive, and it has worked well and I'm very happy with it. Part of its appeal at the time I purchased is was that it sits in a cradle that, as Seagate put it is "a unique adapter that lets you upgrade instantly or change the drive’s interface for faster transfer speeds". I.e. you can upgrade from the USB2 I have to the new USB3, with its promise of 10x faster transfer rate.

So... I've recently purchased a new Lenovo laptop (see below) which sports 2 USB3 ports, whoopee. I therefore have a look on t'internet for the USB3 cradle for my drive. They are very hard to track down. I could find a cradle and PC card combo, but I don't want that. Eventually I found one on Amazon, though not sold by Amazon themselves, for 45 quid. Now... I can buy a complete USB3 external hard drive for that much... so I emailed Seagate asking where I could buy them from at a reasonable price (I speculated at about 20 quid). They replied promptly, thus:

"I apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused you.
You will have to get it from Amazon or through the internet. The reason some or most retailer or distributors might not have it is because the drives that came after are all USB 3.0."

So, polite though that was I think I've just been told to bugger off and not bother them. Not very helpful, and of course that's the last time I'll be buying from Seagate.

As mentioned above, I have purchased a Lenovo laptop recently, which is jolly nice, and I will be writing a review of it once I've been using it for a little while. It's a G580, and cost a very reasonable £400 from PC World.

However, there was, as could be expected, quite a bit of Crapware on it out of the box. (For those not in the know, crapware is software manufacturers stick on their products presumably sponsored by the authors to do so, and it's pretty much always complete... well... crap - or if not exactly crap it's certainly not Free software, it's trial versions mostly).

So, expecting this the first thing I did was uninstall it all... I didn't even run most of it to find out what it was, life is too short.

Having then loaded the machine up with lots of my stuff, I was asked to reboot, and I did, and Windows (8) started updating. Only it failed. It got to 15% and then said there was a problem and gave up, specifically it said "failed configuring windows updates reverting changes". Bit of a worry. And there I was, stuck, cos it just wouldn't do the updates.

I finally tracked down the problem (more lifetime lost never to return) on a Lenovo forum. Turns out that the glitch was caused by one of the bits of crapware. The advice was to go to the crapware and change some settings, but of course I'd uninstalled it!

I finally solved the problem by doing some messing about with the services manager in windows, and finally got through it. But I'm an IT professional who wasn't taking no for an answer.

I wonder how many normal folk out there are sitting in front of Lenovo laptops that will not update vital malarkey in Windows because Lenovo installed crap crapware on their nice new machines?

Bit of an outrage really, but as I said the laptop is (so far) very nice, so maybe I'll just need to move on from this initial setback. Watch this space.

 And finally, I've always been a little bemused by the spam checker incorporated into Gmail. It has frequently dumped perfectly good emails from Google themselves into my Spam folder, which seems extraordinary.

As mentioned above I was writing a contact form for a web site, and in the time honoured way with programmers, I inserted the 'Ipsum lorem' text into my first test. (For those happy individuals who are not programmers, this is a bunch of Latin words that are used as fake input for testing porpoises.) So, I sent the email, and lo, it did not arrive. More head scratching, until I realised it had ended up in my Gmail spam folder. Why? Well it's hard to say, but on investigation there is a Gmail spam rule that states that if the email isn't in the language you are using, then it gets marked as spam. Hmmm. Maybe they ought to introduce a  caveat to that rule to allow Latin?

Bad Driver Hit List

It's that brief period between Christmas and New Year when I feel it's acceptable to be a moaning old grouch (like normal) without being accused of either ruining Christmas or lacking optimism for the New Year. So here goes.

When I am king, and I can decree that it is perfectly acceptable to have a bloomin' great laser gun fitted to the bonnet of your car with which to evaporate the bad drivers holding you up... then this is a list of people who had better not get in my way.

Ahem.

• Forty-mile-an-hour-ers. Usually driving a small hatchback, these idiots maintain a steady 40 in all conditions and locations. You come up behind them on glorious 60mph a-roads pootling along at their fixed speed, and of course there's another one coming the other way that prevents an overtake. But then you get to a town - 30mph limit, and they rocket off into the distance, mowing down small children and mothers with prams as they speed through the busiest of traffic. You lose them in the distance. You clear the town, and quickly catch up with them again. Doing 40mph natch, but now with the odd dead pedestrian impaled over their bonnet, unnoticed by the driver. Repeat until frustration level reaches 11.
• The Blind. Now I'm no spring chicken myself. And I won't be telling you anything you don't know when I say that there are a hell of a lot of elderly drivers out there who can't bloomin' well see where they're bloomin' well going. Oldies... step up to the plate, take one for the team... for God's sake stop driving when you can't see the road any more. Please. I know it'll be hard. But think of what you could potentially do to others by your actions. Use the Tesco home delivery service and buses. Come on.
• Can't-be-bothered-to-indicate-ers. What is it about moving your arm about a foot to use the indicators that some folk find so onerous? There's a roundabout near where I live where 90% of people turn left... so about 90% of these 90% can't get themselves motivated enough to indicate their intentions, I mean they always turn left there, I guess everyone else will know that... The number of times I've sat waiting to get on this roundabout, just in case one of the 10% are actually going straight across it... my life is ebbing away, and all because these peeps can't be bothered. There's another category of roundabout abusers who do the opposite, they indicate left an exit before they're actually going to take... this is actually worse, as you assume that they really are awake enough to indicate... but no, they're just very bad at timing. Come on everyone, indicating is not hard. It's considerate. It's good manners. It's being nice. In my new world order, indicate or die!
• Motorhomes & Caravaners. I don't need to go on, do I? You know that you're being totally selfish. You want a cheap holiday, the rest of us have to lose part of our lives so you can. I don't know how you sleep at night frankly.
• Farmers. Now... there seems to be two sets of rules for governing what you can and can't do on the roads. One set of rules applies to the majority of us, and the other set applies to farmers. Our set of rules is comprehensive, covers most eventualities and is vigorously enforced by the old bill. And the other set of rules for farmers appears to contain one rule, namely "Do whatever the hell you like". This allows them to drive untaxed, uninsured, clearly unroadworthy huge lumps of old tat at ridiculously slow speeds, spewing slippery excrement all over wet roads at any time of the day or night, but most probably during the rush hour. And if you ever see one pull over to allow traffic passed, you know that actually he's reached where he wanted to be. He'll open a gate into a field, drive around the field for a bit picking up as much mud on his tyres as he can, and then try to spread the majority of it over the nearby road, usually on a bend. Farmers live in a world where only what THEY are doing is of any importance, so all this makes sense to them. One day when all our food arrives on ships from China, the tables will turn. 'Fresh' is vastly overrated, give me 'Fast' instead. Vengeance will be ours as farmers slowly expire in the poo of their own making.
• Tail-gaters. Oh that's me. Oh dear. Okay... well, fair enough, I will make a New Year's resolution here and now to stop being a pain and stop tail-gating people. I've got to admit that my erstwhile theory that driving really close behind slow people will (a) cause them to pull over and get out of my way or (b) speed up, or (c) make them feel so guilty for holding me up that they swerve off the road into the nearest wall and die a fiery death - doesn't seem to work. I'll try, I really will. I mean, I'm an older chap in a diesel... it's not like a I really rocket around these days. But I do want to get home before the battery in pace-maker expires, so hopefully all the above guilty folk will try too. Yeah? Happy New Year then! 

Ford Focus Fusebox Fury!

Can I be a little self indulgent here? Can I get something off my chest? I need to have a shout and scream about my Ford Focus. Won't do any good to my wallet, but it might do some good to my psyche...

There have been a couple of posts on this blog about the long term ownership of a Vauxhall Astra and a Ford Focus, both diesels, very similar specs, used in a similar way. See here and here.

The Focus is four years younger than the Astra, and has done half the mileage. But recently it let itself down, it let me down, it let my local Ford dealer down, and it let down Ford UK.

See this picture to the left? See the small amount of corrosion on the terminals?
That cost me £639. Yes. £639!

(Technically, it's a Ford 1712211 "Gem Module/Fuse Box", "Panel Assy - Fuse")

One wet morning recently (are there any other sorts of morning recently?) I set off in the Focus on the school run only to find the wipers were not working.

My local Ford Dealer (understandably) took a day to track down the fault. In the passenger side foot-well, behind the glove box, resides a fusebox. It is a big lump of plastic with fuse holders and some sockets into which plugs the wiring loom. As you can see above, somehow the terminals for the wiper connection had corroded and failed. The dealer didn't give us the choice to just clean up this corrosion, but ploughed on and replaced the fuse box at a cost of £380 odd (or over 2 Xbox360's worth as I like to think of it). They found no evidence of a leak on the foot-well, so how it happened is a mystery.

I have subsequently approached Ford about the resulting alarming bill of £639, but to no avail. The car is obviously out of warranty. They are unashamed of the ridiculous cost of this lump of plastic. The dealership sticks to it's idea that no repair could have been attempted. So I've got to take it on the chin.

No explanation has been put forward as to how this happened, so there's no reason think it won't happen again. I doubt it, as I think the fault must have originated in the manufacturing process. I'd love to hear from anyone else who has experienced a similar problem. I keep thinking that if this fault had manifested itself on the motorway at 70mph in the fast lane on a very wet day, then I would have had a much harder time of it. At least only my wallet got hurt this time.

"Epic fail", Ford... yet another round in the fight to my reliable Astra!

Update 2015 - a few people have contacted me recently having suffered the same fate as myself on this topic. One unfortunate lady actually has had it happen twice! This has got to be a design fault, and Ford are profiting to the tune of £600-£700 each time they get to fix the fault for us. Outrage. Please get in touch with me if you've had this too.

Rant over. Do I feel better? A little maybe... thanks for your indulgence.

I wrote this article a few years ago now, and I must say it was a cathartic exercise to try and make myself feel a little better about this, um, misfortune. However, in recent times I have been contacted by several people in exactly the same position - I was not alone!

It seems extremely probable that the fault is caused in fact by condensation produced by the car's air-con dripping from the glove box onto the unprotected fuse box. In other words a serious design fault. For this, Ford are regularly charging somewhere between £700 to £1000 to put it right - this does not seem fair, now does it?

A recent victim has decided to set up a Facebook page on this subject, you'll find it here : Facebook

Could I urge you if you are a fellow sufferer to visit the page, or to contact me.

Time has passed, I've sold my Focus, but time is not healing the scars. I have heard from many people who have suffered from the same defect and all have been forced to spend large amounts of cash putting it right.

I think Ford should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves for taking advantage of its customers - they made a design error, their dealers get to make hundreds fixing it, complaining does no good.

Plus, due to the random nature of which part of the fusebox corrodes, this is a safety issue too. It's a bloomin' outrage is what it is!

Suffice to say that despite my favourite car of all time being a Ford, and the fact that I've owned more Fords than any other make - I will NEVER buy another. Never ever.

Alanis, Elbow, Darkness and Nickelback

Here's a review of 4 CDs all in one go. This is because I bought these CDs just a few days apart, but using two different methods.

The first two were impulse purchases, pure and simple. I'd gone down town with the firm intention of treating myself to a Samsung Galaxy SIII mobile phone, on contract. But suddenly it all fell apart when I did the maths of just exactly how much a £99 purchase price, plus £27 plus £6 insurance per month for two years actually added up to. So, no phone - I know... I'll buy some music, cheer myself up.

I chose the latest by Nickelback - "Here and Now" and The Darkness -"Hot Cakes". This seemed like a good bet, as I absolutely love both bands. I've got all the albums by Nickelback since their breakthrough single and they're great, and ditto the Darkness, their first album is excellent, their second almost as good. So... safe choices then.

Oh dear. I mean, they're not exactly rubbish, but they are both very disappointing. On both albums there is the odd good track, but really it's the same old same old... especially for Nickelback. I think when he was younger, Chad got get away with this salacious lyrical style, but now it just sounds a bit desperate somehow. I think he needs to mature a little, and get a grip of the music too, no killer rifs here. As for the Darkness, well the lyrics are amusing in some case, though again maybe deliberate bad language doesn't reflect so well now they're a bit older. I'd like to be able to share this music with my young son, it's just annoying to have unnecessarily explicit lyrics stop that. I like a good swear as much as the next chap, but this just seems juvenile. Oh I dunno, maybe I'm getting old... well I am getting old... but neither of these albums stir anything in me at all. Sad really.

Okay, so the other albums. More consideration taken, no spontaneity. These were bought after having listened to both using the excellent Spotify first, so no element of surprise here. Therefore, happy as Larry. Lesson learned.

The first is "Dead in the Boot" by Elbow. It took me a while to cotton on to Elbow. Specifically it took Peter Gabriel to cover one of their songs, a man for who I have infinite respect - the penny dropped, they are fantastic. This is a collection of 'B' sides and rarities, a concept due to die a death in this digital age I'm sure. I suppose to be fair you'd have to admit that they do maybe over-do the plonk plonk plonk single note thing a bit, but the lyrics are always interesting, singing great, playing excellent.

And the second is "Havoc and Bright Lights" by Alanis Morissette, the 'deluxe' version that has a second CD of live performances. Now I would admit that you really do have to be an Alanis fan to find this stuff enjoyable, but I am - so I do. Well up to recent form, and in fact the live CD is if anything more enjoyable, containing as it does some old songs reinterpreted. Again, to be fair to Nickelback and the Darkness, it might be said that she's dragging out her younger shtick into middle age, there's talk of girlfriends and so on, but I forgive her. The tunes are good, the lyrics thoughtful, she is class.

From Amazon : Alanis, Elbow, Darkness and Nickelback