Journal Entries
# You'd be surprised the time I spend/Reinstalling Windows
Posted Jun 13, 2003
UO had been crashing regularly, about three or four times a day. Mostly it would give an out-of-memory error. I suspected this was due to running too much stuff at the same time. It was rapidly becoming unplayable - once I died in the middle of a guild war due to a client crash. 
Other programs were experiencing the same troubles, and ScanDisk and Defrag would give this error when I tried to use them (a long-standing problem that I got around by using ScanDisk in DOS and DiskKeeper Lite instead of Defrag). I decided it was time to reinstall Windows.
First I tried the gentle approach. After backing up my home directory (onto 3 CDs, 2 of which are full of music), my Homeworld saved games, and my NetHack logfile, I rebooted from the Win98 SE CD and reinstalled without uninstalling. After booting into Windows and a bit of experimentation it was clear this hadn't worked. So I took the hard line.
Booting into DOS with a boot floppy, I found deltree.exe and copied it to the RAM disc. Then I went back to C:\ and typed these four brutal words:
C:\>deltree windows
C:\>deltree progra~1
This took a surprisingly long time - about three hours, especially the second part. (progra~1 is DOS-speak for "Program Files", if you didn't know). With this all traces of Windows and my applications disappeared.
Now, having the Win98 CD still in the drive, I ran setup from there. An hour later, having installed all my drivers again, I had a working Windoze system! 
Since those errors had apparently been caused by lack of memory, I went out and bought a half-gig DIMM, thus tripling my RAM from 256 MB to 768 MB. Unfortunately, this pitiful excuse for an OS has a nasty, unfixed bug in it: some system cache goes bezerk in a machine with more than 256 MB and eats all memory. So with the extra memory aLlocated to something that didn't really need it, I couldn't run so much as a DOS box. Even that came up with an out-of-memory error. Even on a machine with 768 MB RAM, a freshly installed copy of Win98 and nothing running except Explorer and Systray 
I didn't know the reason at the time, though, so I logged onto my dad's machine to look for a way around this artificial limit. A friend on MSN Messenger (
) said Win98 can't cope with more than 256 MB. After searching the Web a bit, I came across a page showing exactly my problem. So it seems there is a way around it: tweak an obscure setting in system.ini. Until I find that page again, I have removed the new DIMM and have 256 MB again, which is fine as long as I don't try too much. 
(The title is part of a song called "Reinstalling Windows", to the tune of "When I'm Cleaning Windows" by George Formby. See http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~ivor/winsong.html)
In other news, I dropped into an agency on Wednesday and immediately got a job as a postman in the local area. 
I was going to start on Tuesday rather than Monday since my brace has broken for the second time, and it gets repaired on Monday. I'm now doing my first day tomorrow morning... starting at 6am 
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Latest reply: Jun 13, 2003
The day I admitted defeat
Posted May 21, 2003
My article on Day of Defeat apparently was on the front page yesterday... and I missed it 
This morning I got a letter from UCAS saying they'd declined my university offers because they hadn't heard from me. Woops! Got on the phone to someone at UCAS as soon as I could get through (about 2 hours before I could even get through, then 10 minutes on hold) and told them I wanted to accept Swansea. Well, I had to make a decision, and I think Swansea's good teaching and culture won through. So that's me bound for UWS in late September.
I've been filling in as much of the financial assessment form as I can. Some of it has to be filled in by my parents; some ask for bank details, and I'd better open a student account before I send it off. I could get the account I already have turned into a student account at the start of the course, but my brother had trouble with his Halifax student account (apparently they're really strict about overdraft limits), so he advises me to use some other bank. I've spent much of the evening looking at various banks and their student schemes and comparing them.
Off now to watch Channel 4's Matrix Night... the film (which I ignored since I've seen it already), an episode of The Animatrix, and a documentary on The Matrix Reloaded. 
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Latest reply: May 21, 2003
DoD 1.0
Posted May 1, 2003
Day of Defeat 1.0 came out today. I'll probably not be able to play it for a couple of days since the mirrors and server ops have to download it first. Somebody apparently leaked the download URL to the general public, meaning those mirrors and ops are getting very slow downloads 
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Latest reply: May 1, 2003
I wanna be elected!
Posted Apr 7, 2003
I received my first polling card today! 
It's for a local council election.
I have no idea who the candidates are, let alone their policies.
Discuss this Journal entry [2]
Latest reply: Apr 7, 2003
42ism
Posted Apr 2, 2003
Just worked out my 42ism (see A530560):
151654 -> (1 + 5) * (1 + 6) * (5 - 4) = 42
}:=8
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Latest reply: Apr 2, 2003
Pete, never to have a time-specific nick again (Keeper of Disambiguating Semicolons) - Born in the Year of the Lab Rat
Researcher U151654
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