Where have you been?

Okay, you don't want to know my trials and tribulations, but you do deserve an explanation of where I disappeared to yesterday.

I mentioned that I got a new computer and have gone back to work so I'd probably be posting lightly for a week while I juggled schedules and transferred files. The latter got a little more complicated than I expected.

I have someone I intend to give my "old, slow it was a blazing speed demon three or four years ago" computer to. (So no, it's not being thrown out.) But in the course of trying to clean up the disk, uninstall crap, etc., I had a total system meltdown that eventually required reinstalling Windows98.

The reinstall program deletes the existing version of '98 before installing the new one. Fine. Except that the new install wouldn't work; it just kept dropping to a c:\ prompt. So at that point I had no Windows at all. I kept re-booting, trying to figure out what was going wrong - and discovering that the computer was recognizing the presence of the d: drive (where the install CD was) only about half the time.

I finally got the computer to fess up that the problem was that the Windows setup program exceeded the "largest executable program size" for the free memory I had available.

Happily, I had already set up the new computer for online access, because I then had to use it to go online to look up DOS commands, which I had long since forgotten. After a good deal of frustration, I figured out that I had to edit my autoexec.bat file to remove an installed memory manager to reboot to free up space to run the install to get Win98 back for the house that Jack built.

Of course, this also meant I had to reinstall drivers for video, sound, and modem. (I didn't bother with the printer; I figured I could live without it until the new computer is set up.)

So, okay, that seemed done.

Now, the old computer had a CD drive but no CD-RW drive; the old one crapped out on me a while back and although I had bought a new on a few months ago I'd never gotten around to actually installing it. When I got the new computer I figured "why bother" - I actually thought of selling it to recoup part of the cost of the new machine.

I have a Zipdrive and I was using that to load up disks to transfer the various files I wanted to the new computers. Yesterday it was all ready to go. I brought the Zipdrive to the new machine. It installed in a flash. I put in the disk - it didn't work.

Huh?

It turned out that the disk compression scheme I'd used on the Zip disks only works on Win98 - and the new machine, of course, is XP.

So the disks were unreadable. What I said is unprintable.

SO...

I installed the damn CD-RW drive in the old machine. Copied about 400mb worth or files to a new CD. Brought the CD to the new machine - it said the CD is blank.

AAAAA!!!!!

This time, however, it turned out to be a simple matter of having misread the instructions: I'd only done a dummy burn of the new CD. I went back, did it right, and it works.

YES! IT WORKS! IT WORKS!

There were, however, some losses: References and links to articles that were stored on the desktop for easy access when writing things for here are, of course, gone. A couple that I really want I knew where to go back for, but the others, well, ::shrug::. But things do seem to be back on track, at least for the moment.

So still expect light blogging for a few more days but I will try to make the wait worthwhile.