Well the blog was offline for a long long time – we had some major problems with the hard drives on the weblogs.us servers and the whole setup had to be taken offline.
Finally up and running up again now and everything seems to be in place – many many thanks to JD for the incredible work he has done!
So almost unbelievably, I’m posting again, after a gap of (checks the site) 6 weeks :O. What happened?
Ok, in chronological sequence:
1. Oblivion – TES IV sucked almost 3 weeks of my life. Mostly in figuring out how to get it to play on my laptop (Many thanks to asp and his awesome Oldblivion). Once I had finally figured out the configuration settings that would get me a stable, playable framerates (You’d be surprised how playable TES IV is even at 6 fps 
), I wound up spending a mess of time figuring out all the mods I should have in the game. Hence, many hours spent over at TESS
2. My laptop’s hard drive crashed. A complete, unrecoverable crash. The BIOS couldn’t see the Hard drive kind of crash. 
(. Since I operate mostly from my client’s offices, I never had a network drive to back stuff up onto, so 3 years of offical and personal data is now trapped in my old hard drive (More than 3 years actually, I had email archives and downloads from my college days on it as well )
I’m still hoping I get my data back, though there was quite a ruckus in my office over the price of getting the contents recovered in Singapore. So it’s gone to India and I await further news on it.
It took me forever to recover from this, simply because I had to scour the Net again for installers for all my favourite software. It took me a while just to remember what were all the programs I had installed!
I’ve got myself an external hard disk now (200GB, USB2.0) and am using Second Copy to back up all my stuff. I did play around with SyncBackSE initially, but it wasn’t reliable enough for me (using Windows scheduler to trigger the backup jobs really put me off).
3.Work – obviously losing all my data put a major crimp on my productivity. Once I had my laptop back, there was a metric fuck ton of work to catch up on. Just as I was getting my head back above water, I was asked to travel my company HQ in Bangalore for a conference.
So I’m back in Singapore now, recovering from my Bangalore trip (more on that in a little while) and picking up the threads of my blog 
.
PS: Many thanks to Richie – his gentle questioning forced me off my lazy ass and back on this blog
So now that I finally have managed to restore my PC to more or less where it was before the crash, it’s time to reflect on the error of my ways.
Lesson #1: The Windows XP default look is fine..really. Stop messing with it, when you know you are going to switch back in 1 day. If you get tired of the default, use signed skins like Royale. That’s pretty much all you are going to need.
Lesson #2: Don’t try funny things when travelling – losing your computer when away from your usual network is an unmitigated pain in the ass.
Lesson #3: The Files & Settings Transfer Wizard of XP is very limited. I installed almost all my programs as a local administrator. When I got back on the network, I applied a file generated in the Local admin login using the Settings Wizard, but most programs refused to work till I reinstalled them in my Network ID. The Wizard only applied my theme and some other limited stuff. Switching User IDs in Windows is still painful.
Lesson #4: SVS Altiris is not the software virtualization tool I was looking for. I was hoping that I could create a layer for every software I install on my PC after applying the security updates and installing MS-Office. My hope was then when the time came to hand in my laptop, I would remove all the layers from SVS and my laptop would revert to the vanilla setup that my company uses.
Unfortuantely, SVS does not handle multiple layers well (you have to deactivate one to activate another), it doesn’t install itself as a service (which means a program that launches on startup and you have virtualized will fail till SVS activates) and many programs and installs slow down like crazy once you virtualize.
The dream of clean uninstalls in Windows is still a long way off.
In case anyone was wondering why my blog has been very quiet these last few days, it’s because I trashed my XP installation. I was playing around with a Vista Transformation Pack, a collection of hacks to skin your Windows XP to look like Vista.
I didn’t wait long enough after installing for some WFP dialogs to come up and rebooted. All the boot files were wiped out by this
Have spent the last 2 days painfully rebuilding my PC – though that did give me the chance to strip out of some of the stuff I don’t need anymore.
Oh, and while I have spoken about SVS Altiris in my blog before, I can tell you that it’s not that useful. More details later. Daily links should resume from tomorrow.
PS: I am currently travelling (see where I am below ) and am a bit rushed. Will update this post again later with links to the Vista Transformation Pack, my earlier post on SVS etc.
PPS: Post updated for links promised above.