I got a new desktop computer recently. It’s very cool. It’s so fast I can post this tonight and not even worry about having the idea until a week from Thursday. Anyhoo, once I got my many gigs of goodies safely ensconced on the new machine, it seemed like a good time to reformat my HP dv5000 series laptop, the machine I’m using at this moment. Just wipe the hard drive clean and start over. It’s 3 years old and getting a little gummy and wobbly.

Don’t worry, this has a happy ending. The laptop is all restored, good as new, and running fine. We writers gotta keep our tools in working order, right?

In the good old days, a few years ago, a person who wanted to restore his computer used a disk that came with the machine. You bought the expensive thing, and it came with a genuine Windows disk, with a certificate of sanctity signed by Bill Gates. But computer makers are going cheapass on us, kids. My laptop gave me the option of creating my own restore disks when I first turned it on in 2006. Wow.

On the hard drive, there is also a partition – a special section, set apart from the rest of the computer’s contents – which can be activated to restore Windows XP on the computer. But here’s the problem:

There’s no instruction anywhere on the computer, or anywhere on the HP Web site, or really anywhere on any site on the Internet that a person can trust, that tells us how to use that partition. I even downloaded the technical manual for the laptop from HP, and it’s not mentioned. It has complete diagrams for reducing the beast to a pile of plastic and screws and putting it back together, but no restoration.

So today I put in the disk (there are two DVDs) and started the reformat. It warned me that I was erasing the hard drive, but I forged ahead. Then it told me what you – if you have found this post looking for the information – need to know:

It said this restore is going to make a partition on your hard drive for restoration of your computer to factory condition. If you ever need to use it, press F11 while booting up.

It told me this after the disk had started erasing my hard drive. Too late to go back and use that option. Then the disks took well over an hour – around 90 minutes – to do the job. With the set up business afterwards, it was close to 2 hours.

Sunuffabish. I have to believe that was not the fast way to do it. In fact, I’ve reformatted 2 other computers in the last week for other people – also Windows XP – and it took more like 30 or 45 minutes.

So here’s the poop:

To restore an HP (Hewlett-Packard) dv5000 series laptop (notebook) using the restore partition on the hard drive, press F11 during start-up. … Probably … that’s what it said to do.

Now, the information is googleable on the Internet, permanently. At least, that’s the premise of a blog post. It has a permanlink. (On a blogger blog like this one, the link is the time, at the end of the post, and it’s also the title of the post.) You’re welcome.

Oh, and by the way, my new computer is also an HP, with Windows Vista. It came with no disks at all. Just the partition on the hard drive. Which does not make me feel very secure.

“If Google were a time machine, you could not only see what happened in the past, but do research against it.”

–Doc Searls Weblog:

Interesting insights into instincts of the Web with respect to data over time.

“Are you a Firefox user? Apparently, if you are you’re not alone. Sometime this year when I wasn’t paying attention Firefox rocketed to a new high. For over three years I watched as Firefox hovered between a 30–34% browser share. This month I was surprised to see that Firefox consistently exceeds 40% and is preparing to take over IE as the most popular browser.”

— Bits from Bill: Firefox Ready to be the #1 Browser.

I like Firefox, and I’ve been using it for quite a while. But it’s rise in competition with Explorer surprises me. I wouldn’t have thought that so many people were going out of their way to download an alternative to the browser that comes bundled with their operating system. Adding an alternative browser isn’t hard to do, but it’s something.

Kindlegarten, get it? ‘Cause this post is about the Kindle digital book-reading thing. I amuse myself.

Thinkiing about buying one? Or getting your book published for it? Here’s a blog post on johnaugust.com, with a pretty comprehensive assessment.

Hey check it out, gmail is 7 gigabytes now. The limit on gmail is constantly increasing, incrementally, day and night. When I first started using it a couple of years ago, it was a little over 2gb. This is very cool.

Just for comparison, remember those little flat floppy discs we used to use? You could store dozens, maybe hundreds, of emails on a floppy. 7gb is something like 6300 floppy discs. When I first started using Web mail, Yahoo gave you 3mb of storage, Hotmail have you 2mb. 1 gb is 1000 mb. And it’s free.

Yahoo mail is unlimited now. Which is great. But the features just aren’t there, like conversations that keep sent mail and incoming mail together, and labels. Labels let you organization mail by multiple topics or people, instead of deciding on just one folder to put them in.

I’m using 16% of my limit, and I have about 12,000 conversations stored. Some conversations have several e-mails, so that’s a whole lot of e-mails, kids. Plus I often store large photos and videos in my gmail account.

You can use gmail with almost any email account – like Cox, verizon, even Yahoo. And it’s much better than messing with a downloading software like Outlook or Outlook Express, in my opinion.

So I guess I’m sayin, I really like gmail.

gmail.com

“SAN FRANCISCO — Internet pioneers Yahoo Inc. and AOL were closing in on a deal late Wednesday that would combine their businesses into an online advertising giant, according to four people familiar with the talks.

If consummated, the deal could let Yahoo wriggle out of a situation that this week had seemed inevitable: succumbing to Microsoft Corp.’s unsolicited $42-billion takeover bid.”[Los Angeles Times]

Oh, the horror! The horror!

Yahoo was my way out of the blight that was AOL. It was my lifeboat, when AOL became becalmed in a vast and chewy sea of dial-up Content. Now Yahoo has been blown into the horse latitudes too, and I’ve moved on to using Google as my Internet sloop. But it’s hard to see my old vessel from Silicon Valley go down by the bow; worse yet, to be towed out by this giant sluggish freighter.

Too much Metaphor? Sorry.

Look at the title of the post two posts down from this. It says wrtiers and producers. WTF?

You need to know – and tell a bloggy friend – if you’re using Firefox and rely on its wonderful running spellchecker, that it doesn’t work in Blogger title fields. It will let you hose a post, and presumably somebody at Mozilla is laughing at you, not with you.

I’m kidding, it’s cool. It’s worth it; so much less Terminator than Microsoft Exploder.

“We speak of life as an oboe
speaks, in Summer colors
stirring the orchards
playing the windchimes by the door.”

[Link]

Hey, look what I learned how to do.

I learned how to make a Web page in MS Publisher, a program I didn’t know I had until I stumbled across it i my Start menu today. More importantly, I learned how to use Windows Explorer to open and upload to an FTP site. This is just a simple little sample test page, with a poem I wrote a long time ago. I still have a lot to learn about the program’s features.

I’ve used Front Page and Dreamweaver before (I’ll let you google them), but I don’t have them anymore, and have no inclination to buy such expensive software right now. So for a long time, I’ve been using Yahoo’s Pagebuilder, since my site is hosted by Melborn via Geocities, which long ago was bought out by Yahoo.

Well, Pagebuilder simply sucks; it’s nothing. Complaints to Yahoo, shaming them for not updating a Web app that dates to the latter part of the last century, fall on indolent ears.

Publisher is included with my copy of MS Office. So now I can create Web pages in Publisher, upload via FTP, and I’m good as gold. I rock. (Golf applause please.)