Yesterday I went to work DJ’ing at Alternation like every Wednesday which required me to use my laptop as I am a digital DJ. I noticed that certain directories seemed to be empty despite the music search feature clearly showing files in those directories and some songs were hopeless corrupted causing Traktor DJ Studio to freeze up. On Tuesday evening I installed Service Pack 3 for Windows XP and shut down to finish the install the next day as I didn’t need to use XP again until Wednesday. Upon startup I completed the install and everything seemed fine for the first hour then the gremlins came out big time. I noticed that whole directories have vanished from the filesystem; later causing the software to freeze as the song I tried to play was corrupted. I had a dual boot system set up on the laptop for me to use a separate partitions for home and work, the primary [home] partition had Vista installed and the secondary [work] partition had XP installed. Upon installing Service Pack 3 for XP it managed to complete corrupt my primary [Vista] partition which became very apparent when I got home and found that I couldn’t boot Vista at all because of the vast amount of corrupted files on that partition. The problem with the music while DJ’ing could have been worse but most of the music was on good sectors of the hard disk. So I have just installed XP on the machine now as I need to have XP installed because Creative who made my external soundcard have discontinued support for that product and therefore there aren’t any drivers for Vista. I guess it’s for the best really as Vista was starting to bug me with it’s insistence on asking me to confirm every action I take several times. But there was also a lot that I liked about it as the laptop was designed to run on Vista, but primarily it was bought for work use as I don’t need a laptop for home use as I have a desktop computer!
I can’t believe I am about to write this but one thing pleased me last night and that thing was Manchester United beating Chelsea in the Champions League final. I don’t like either team but I dislike Manchester United less than I dislike Chelsea. It’s not because Chelsea knocked out Liverpool in the semi-finals because the Reds were the architect’s of their own downfall with John Arne Riise’s late own goal at Anfield and Benitez running his mouth about Didier Drogba’s diving dossier. It would have been a great final between Liverpool and United; two of the old guard when it comes to European success, but it wasn’t to be; at least not this year. Cristiano Ronaldo put United into the lead half way through the first half but Frank Lampard equalised for Chelsea before half time. Lampard and Didier Drogba hit the woodwood; Ronaldo missed his second penalty of the tournament. Eventually the game was settled in a dramatic penalty shoot out in which the Mancs came out on top 6 – 5.
