Ingoal and Windows 8

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Just as Microsoft was realising windows 8 to the public I thought to myself: oh well, let’s give it a shot…a brand new microsoft os for 29.99€ (upgrade offer 32/64bit) and available via digital download – I like.

So I started by downloading and generating and install images afterwards and then I started the upgrade process (Windows 7 –> Windows 8) with the options to keep both files and programs. Upgrade itself went smoothly up to the point where the “windows based part” of the installation (aka configuration) should have been started. I was staring at a blank screen, but the computer itself was working (blinking leds for hdd etc).

Then I made a big mistake, I didn’t think about the situation and thought the upgrade was faulty and that I should do a clean install. But in the clean install I wound up at the same point. So I thought about what it could be…and the only reasonable explanation was the graphics-card or the monitor…but as the monitor worked fined (post-screen and all), i was left with the option graphics card. You gotta know that I have a custom mini-pc that I built a few years back featuring an mATX-Board with integrated graphics cards (Nvidia Geforce 6150) with an DVI-riser card. So I searched in my box of “old cables” and got myself an old vga-cable (blue plug) and *drumroll* I had a picture again.

To make a long story short, I had similar problems with Vista and Win7 as well, but in those I could get the dvi-riser card running with a few tricks…no such luck in windows 8. So for the time being I worked with the analogous connection, but quickly checked Amazon to see what was out there for cheap. Suffice to say that I hadn’t been keeping uptodate with the pc hardware developments like I used to – so I was pleasantly surprised to find a “low end” Gainward GeForce 210 with 1GB of ram for under 30€…how times have changed!

Yesterday the shipment arrived and I installed the new graphics card in under 5 minutes and *drumroll again* now I’m back with a digital connection dvi/hdmi and everything is running smoother than ever (you gotta remember that the old integrated graphics were a few years old)…I like! And with ClassicShell installed, the windows “standard part” just looks like Windows 7 again…best of both worlds!

…and that is my only caveat with Windows 8 – why in the world would you take away the Start button without an inbuilt option to choose whether you wanted it or not Microsoft? That is lame…

Happy new year!

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…don’t worry, this is a scheduled post as I’m offline at a new year’s eve party…nontheless I wanted to be on time to wish all of you a very happy and successfull 2012! :-)

Happy New Year 2012!

Regards,

Ingoal

Happy holidays, merry christmas…

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How time flies, I can’t believe that I went almost a year without posting around here. I guess the whole social media thing is taking over my eagerness to communicate…and so I find myself posting on both facebook and twitter regularly, while this blog has become somewhat mute.

I’ll try to keep the blog a little more up2date again…we’ll see how that goes. Anyway…the real reason I went online and opened the blog was for a simple reason – to wish all of you a merry christmas, happy holidays with your family, friends and loved ones!

Yours truly,

New year new install

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Hehe…I managed to screw up my windows installation today, so today is reinstall day. Thanks to my ssd configuration the reinstall is pretty quick, but it’s still a hassle to remember all the stuff you had on your computer and reinstall it all…oh well…almost done and the system feels extra snappy again – not that it was sluggish before or anything, once again thanks to the ssd as my system drive.

iPad crazyness and stupid people

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I mean okay, the iPad seems to be way cool and in all honesty, I’ll probably order one once they become available over here in germany (depending on the price which is yet to be determined), but what the hell is going on?

Over here there’s a new crazyness about this “new” auction format where there’s an item, e.g. the ipad, which starts at 0.01 Euro and an amount of time x. Every time someone bids, the time y is added (e.g. 10 seconds) and the price increases by an amount z (e.g. 0.01Euro). The ultimate winner of the auction will pay the end price, but wait, there’s a kicker. Every bid in an auction costs 0.5 Euro (0.675$).

So, there’s one winner and x people bidding, in the end there’s the lucky winner and x people having payed for nothing…and even the winner might really be a loser.

See the following example which I witnessed this afternoon:

crazy

crazy

So, let’s do a little math:

1. The iPad has a value of 499$
2. There were 4986 bids for 0.675$ (0.5Euro) a pop, which equals 3366,25$ for the site running the auction.
3. The “winner” of the auction is the ultimate loser, 1524 bids + the final price = 811,87 Euro or 1.095,79$

Wtf is going on here? This auction platform is like printing money, I guess there are more and more idiots getting up every morning, you just have to find them and they’ll hand you their money…sad..really sad…

Upgrading day and how twitter messed up my blogging…

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So, it was time again to do some upgrading…WordPress 2.8.4 it is from now on. All plugins updated as well…it’s been a while since I did a major upgrade, but as usually everything went dandy, thumbs up WordPress!

So…half a year with no post…I didn’t even realize I didn’t post here in ages…really weird, but hey, ever since I started using twitter, I tend to post little tid-bits there instead of posting a new post on here…maybe I should change that again…and post at least a wrap-up of what’s been going on around here…we’ll see…I wonder if anyone is still reading this anyway ;-)

2009

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Well, the new year is already a few weeks (errm months) old and I didn’t have much time to blog around here…busy busy…work work work…all good though, just wanted to give you all a headsup that I made it safely into 2009…may it be a blessed year for you and yours….

Greetings from munich

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Hi there one and all, greetings from munich. Foggy, cold, munich. At least the beer is still one of the best in the world and my hotel room, read: suite, is mighty awesome. Not that I can enjoy it much during the day – training courses start at 9am and last until probablyy 5:30pm….but hey…better little time in an awesome room than a long time in a hawesome room (like it was the case two weeks ago in cologne where I stayed in an extended closet for a whole week ;))…alrighty…I’m outta here….

Still got little time to post around here…

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…because I started a new job, which I really like, but it keeps my private online time to a minimum…so don’t wonder about the not all that regular updates around here. Next week I’m off to cologne for the week…after that I’m in munich…getting around…I guess I’ll take my digicam with me so maybe you’ll see a few snapshots…we’ll see….