I held off writing this post honestly more out of laziness than anything else, but also because I wanted to make sure that my replacement setup was going to hold out in the short-medium term, and thankfully, it seems to be. Let's catch you up... The eMachines Box is no stranger to problems. I've already had to replace the hard drive on it twice, going with a (freshly twenty-year-old) 250GB WD Caviar drive at first, and then when that gave up, simply going with a modern SSD plugged into an Read more
I have returned to the States, journal people! I was pretty down about it for a few days, but time and diving into this year's trip diary helped move me along. I say this every time I come back, but that's because stuff truly gets better every time I come back—this was the happiest and comfiest trip Caby and I have had yet. Never met anyone I'm just that well matched with and attached to, and I still miss her guinea pigs and watching Red Dwarf in the lounge and time spent cuddling and days out Read more
F's in chat for the eMachines Box's hard drive once again. This was a sudden failure. The machine was really slow all of a sudden, which I thought might've been an errant background process, only for XP to tell me that the C: drive was not formatted! That's an error you don't want to see. I quickly booted into my Ubuntu (10.04 LTS, Lucid Lynx if you prefer :lince:) rescue drive and thankfully was able to copy off basically everything I wanted to that I hadn't had backed up, which included my Read more
The new hard drive arrived yesterday; she's back up and running. I'm writing this on the eMachines Box once more. Got her on XP Media Center Edition SP3, like she should've been running all this time, and now it's just repeatedly installing updates from Legacy Update over and over (the POSReady stuff is key for getting TLS 1.2 and thus Escargot fully functional), getting my programs and games back on here, and slowly getting everything situated again. Media Center Edition got a custom version Read more
So I would've had the eMachines Box back up and going by now, but unfortunately, my stupid ass bought a SATA drive! It had an IDE one in there. I returned that this morning at work and rush-ordered an equivalently-sized IDE drive from eBay yesterday. It should be here by the 21st. Hopefully that's the end of it. That said, there are some new things to note in the saga: First and foremost, the old drive does still kinda work! Work has some IDE-to-USB cables on the tech bench, and plugging it Read more
I'm gonna be honest, I'm going through it a bit right now, hence the lack of journal posts. It's alright, everything is fine—strictly speaking, work is a grind but a pretty positive one (I got a really nice thank you card from one of the other employees for helping them out so much, and I think I am selling more ESP than anyone else still, a month on, so I feel pretty confident in myself), and the group is chatty as always and I think pretty close?—mostly just working on a lot of really cool Read more
So, as you've probably seen in some of the photos I've been posting lately, the eMachines Box finally has its own setup. I already had the PS/2 keyboard that went to this machine, and I bought a cheap wired mouse from work partially because I needed another mouse, partially because I needed a spare even after I upgrade this one, and partially because the cheapness of the mouse seems to complement the low-end nature of the eMachines Box anyway. I also needed to get an extra long ethernet cable Read more
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