I got my new laptop yesterday and had a day of fighting Windows. I had the idea to dual boot Vista (for home use) and XP (for my DJ’ing activities). But of course it was never going to be that simple! You can only dual boot if you have XP pre-installed and not the other way around without loads of hacking of the bootloader and partitioning of drives (easier said that done with an OS present). Also it wouldn’t allow me to copy certain required files across to the hard disk despite XP being installed in a completely different folder. So in the end I ditched Vista completely as reclaimed some 10GB of hard disk space that was being taken up by the restore partition. Now you might be asking; why do I want to install a ‘technically’ inferior operating system? Well the answer is simple, my external soundcard which allows me to run two stereo channels (FOH/Monitor) doesn’t work in Vista because Creative has discontinued support for the product! Now I have a legit product key for Vista but I don’t have the Vista software as I overwrote the restore files which were located on a separate partition on the hard disk; OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturers) don’t actually supply a physical copy of Windows anymore. You need to burn a (backup) DVD from the hard disk image, cheap bastards! Other than that I am very happy with the new laptop; it has a slight glitch in the TFT but I can deal with that; it has what is known as a dead pixel on the active matrix. Which can be one of four things; either the pixel is literally dead (black) or constant ‘on’ pixel (either red, green or blue) and mine is red, which is kinda annoying, but I’ll get used to it! It’s technically not a fault; there is a certain tolerance for dead pixels before it becomes a fault. That tolerance seems to be between 6 and 11 pixels dependant on the manufacturer. But the important thing is that it performed excellently under the conditions it was bought for; my DJ’ing activities, so on that front I am very happy, I can’t complain about one dead pixel when I got the laptop for a third of the retail price!
I just read this news on the BBC website and I am astonished! How drunk must you be to not notice a six inch knife in your back? The Russian man was out on the lash after work with a colleague and was stabbed in the back by his drinking buddy during an argument! The man spent the night in the works offices, then in the morning got on a bus home, ate breakfast, then went to bed to catch a couple of hours sleep. His wife noticed the knife’s handle sticking out of his back upon waking him and the man who stabbed him turned himself into the police. Just how hardcore are Russian people to not notice being stabbed? While we are on the subject of strange things; on the other side of the World in Australia two policemen were left embarrassed as a crook they’d arrested drove off in their car while handcuffed as they collected evidence. The coppers made the mistake of handcuffing the arrestee with his hands in front of his body instead of behind his back allowing him to climb into the drivers seat, start the engine and drive off leaving the policemen stranded!
In sport; Plymouth Argyle have found some new investment from the far east. K&K Shonan Management Corporation have bought a 20% share in Plymouth Argyle. Hopefully the new shareholders are willing to splash a little cash to strengthen the squad and hopefully hang onto the likes of McCormick, Halmosi and Timar. But at the moment no real details of the investment has been publicised but manager Paul Sturrock has gone on record as saying that next season Plymouth will be prime promotion candidates next season. I’ll wait and see; as a long suffering Argyle supporter I wont be counting my chickens before they hatch!