Gettysburg

Today we decided to do some sight seeing close to home so we went to Gettysburg and spent the day. Its a shame we had never gone before its less than 60 miles from our house and it was the first time me or my wife had ever been. We had an excellent time there and we will be returning again in the near future to spend some more time looking around.

We spent a great deal of time in the museum but it was a day well spent and our kids really enjoyed it.

NAS Server

I found a new program Freenas based upon free BSD that allows you to use an old computer for network storage. It uses hardly any resources you can set it up as a headless server and hide it away in a corner someplace. It took very little time to set it up and get it on line. I have a lot of old hardware sitting around and was going to get another portable hard drive so I thought I would try this and save myself some money. So far so good the firewall seems simple enough as well.This is the web interface to set it up from another computer.

Fedora

Fedora website

Office 2007 setup runs

Normally I don't waste time on Windows but this might actually help someone.

A few weeks ago my wife got me a new dell laptop and it came with Win 7 and a free trial of office 2007 pre-installed. My wife has a laptop with the trial version of office on it as well. We decided to buy Office since you can install it on 3 machines and she needs it for work. Hers is working fine but mine was a nightmare after 2 attempts to uninstall office, the uninstaller said I had to have the disk which I didn't have since it was pre installed, needless to say I found the answer on Microsoft's website. Well after a complete reinstall of office I discovered every time I try to open a document it ran the installer program. I found a LOT of post's in forums and such looking for an answer. I tried everything I saw and nothing worked so I took a process viewer I have and installed it to see exactly what processes were running and when so I could track it down "guess Microsoft can't figure that out?" anyhow it was the setup.exe from the original Office trial prog in the Microsoft shared/office12/office setup controller file. I renamed the file setup.exe.old and now it magically works fine. This was after about 3 hours of wasted time reading and trying everything I could. That my friends is why I mostly stick to LINUX things don't "just Run" unless you execute them.

Windows In Mandriva

Here is a screen shot of Windows 7 running in virtual box on my Mandriva machine, I wanted to see how it performs on this system I dual boot with XP. I have a Dell laptop with windows 7 on it and I am pleased with it, as much as I dislike Windows I still need it for certain work related things. As for my every day needs I use Mandriva.

Spring Cleaning

with the warmer weather approaching I noticed my computer was running a little warmer so after a quick inspection I noticed all of the winters dust had settled inside my computer.

So a little help from the vacuum and I was all set, I think thats one thing a lot of people tend to forget about and it can really slow your computer down and damage the hardware inside with the extreme heat and all. For instance this picture

this was one someone brought me to fix late last summer, I still dont know how it even still managed to boot or do much of anything. I like to take a shop vac and put the hose in the exhaust port and blow the dust out that way you don't risk static damaging anything also you can keep the hose back a foot or so where if you are using the vacuum to suck the dust out you need to make contact or get very close to delicate parts.

redirects

sorry all the redirect has been removed as far as i can tell.