Reading and writing on the computer hurt my head so I decided to complete a couple of unfinished tasks. Manual labour (or as close as I ever get).

A few months ago my favourite Air Force Engineer / T-shirt business owner replaced the front speakers in my little car with nice new Sony Xplods. At the same time he put in some fancy Sony Xplod 6X9s in my parcel shelf. As he was off on one of his regular Air Force trips he left the wiring to me. And of course I didn’t get around to it until today.

Being unable to focus on a computer screen but feeling strangely (very strangely) energised I decided to tackle the job today. First of all I attacked the original speaker grill with a table knife. I often use table knives to fix things. The grills came off easily so and I was able to use a real Philips screw driver to get at the speakers. They were easy to dislodge and I cut the wires with my pliers (I have been known to use my teeth before). Then I fed the new speaker wire through the entry for the wheel spring mount thingies and twisted it on to the existing wire. I thought about soldering it but decided against that because I’ve only just recovered from the burns I got from my last soldering endevour. Then I clipped the speaker while onto the speakers and voila! it all worked.

The next task that I had to complete was to put my radio head unit back into its place. A month or so ago the radio stopped working and so I pulled it out to have a look at all of the connections and make sure they were still connected. Sadly they were and the problem (since confirmed by a real auto electrician) is that the tuner inside the radio has died. It’s not an uncommon event in elderly radios apparently. So, after driving around with my radio head unit hanging off into the passenger seat well for a few weeks I decided to put it all back together again.  I fiddled my way through that job – even tidying up the cassette wiring so that I can hide my iPod in the glove box. I was a little worse for wear at the end of it …

The set up I have now has served us well for a few years. My father gave us the head unit and a 10CD stacker several years ago and I initially had them installed in our Suzuki 4WD. When I bought the Subaru it had an incredible sound system although I missed the CD unit. I moved the set up to the Mitsubishi when I bought it last year and apart from the woeful factoiry speakers I’ve been really happy with it. Now I’m on the lookout for a radio with an iPod and USB interface but being as I have a working 10CD stacker under my seat and the iPod through the cassette link it’s not an urgent need – probably quite good to be away from the news occasionally.

The finished job (just a bit of clipping back of the wiring to be completed):

The only place to get car audio help: The Crutchfield Community

No related posts.

Early impressions:

Good

• Vista installed very easily.
• Tablet functionality is excellent – a vast improvement on the earlier software. Handwriting recognition is much better.
• Aero glass looks good. Even though the graphics score of this machine is only 3.0 it looks great.
• I installed Ultimate Edition so I have access to Media Centre. Looks good – as above. I don’t think that my aging TV card will work under Vista. Might need to find a new one.
• It seems to be more stable than XP. I hope that I am not tempting fate here!
• Ready Boost – it’s happening, and I think I’m faster!

Bad

• I have set Firefox to be my default browser but Vista doesn’t listen – I am not impressed with the fact that I can’t get IE7‘s new tabs to open in the background.
• I haven’t got Remote Desktop or Logmein working to my server yet. I haven’t tried hard though.
• Constant dialogue boxes and “are you sure?” questions could drive me demented very quickly.

EDIT: I am not impressed with having to go to the Microsoft Site and download the Mobilie Device Centre to get my iPaq Pocket PC to synchronise with Vista. That’s something that should have been sorted for RTM.

Indifferent

• The sidebar. Not sure yet.
• I haven’t got the power options sorted yet.

The geek in me wants the latest and greatest operating system on my computer. The pragmatist knows that it’s really important to get my work done on a well functioning computer. At this point I won’t be dropping my XP partition anytime soon. Certainly I’ll get more work done on Vista because it won’t let me do my usual morning’s scoot through FeedDemon opening masses of links in the background for a later peruse . On the other hand I think it could be faster than XP and I haven’t had the annoying 20-30 second freeze that is an annoying ‘feature’ of Tablet Edition on the M00.

There are a couple of things concerning me about Vista – one being the DRM and content protection measures built into the operating system (read here). On the other hand, in my line of work I will be asked to support Vista reasonably early this year.

Related posts:

1. MS Vista
2. Tablet @ Work – Day 1
3. Reinstalling XP Tablet Edition

I have re-imaged it from Toshiba’s image several times but the sheer number of bits and pieces added in by Toshiba have alway annoyed me. The hardware is great – but the software to support that hardware is awful. Over the last week it’s been like woring through thick sludge trying to get basic tasks accomplished. Having a gigabyte of memory is useless if it’s swallowed up by seemingly redundant drivers and processes. I like to be in charged of what I run on my computer. They don’t call it a PC for nothing.
So this week I bit the bullet. After a search around the interweb I discovered a way to cleanly install XP Tablet Edition. I used nLite to create my own Toshiba flavoured version of the Tablet PC OS. Using Media Centre Edition as the base OS, I slipstreamed in the Toshiba Raid drivers. Then after tweaking it a bit for my own particular preferences, I made an ISO. I used Nero to burn the ISO to CD and voila – one Tablet Edition disk.

Last night I started the XP install process. I used the key that Toshiba used to install Windows even though it’s different to the one printed on the sticker on the notebook. I’m not totally certain about how kosher that is? It worked though!

After getting XP loaded, installing my anti-virus and testing the pen (to make doubly sure that I had done it right), I put in my Toshiba drivers disk – the one one that I made from the factory install. I loaded the wireless drivers and then headed straight out to Windows update. After that I headed to Toshiba’s support site and got the latest basic driver set. After making sure I had got all the drivers I started to load the additional stuff to run the stuff that I wanted to run.

I have loaded the hard drive protection utility but not the accelerometer (who in their right mind would want to shake a computer to start a programme?). I loaded the raid driver but not the additional systems because I don’t think that I’ll be using an extra hard drive.

I haven’t loaded the Toshiba Power Saving stuff because I’m hoping that Notebook Hardware Control on top of the default Windows setup will take care of my power saving needs. I haven’t loaded ConfigFree because, much as I like the idea of being able to change the network and proxy server information on the fly, it’s just too resource hungry.
At the moment I have a basic installation with all of the basic programmes that I use on a day to day basis. Firefox (and all my extensions – gotta love FEBE) is looking after my browsing and FeedDemon is taking care of my RSS. Office is installed and I’ve got Nero and WinDVD loaded. I’ve put VideoLan in for my media needs but I still need to load Quicktime Alternative and Real Alternative to manage the extra codecs.

At the moment I am back in love with this little computer. It’s whizzing along beautifully with none of the lags or stuttering that have blighted things previously. For sure I have yet to put in PaintShopPro, Inspiration, KidPix or some of the other programmes that I use regularly. So far so good. Now I really need to find that Ghost disk!

Related posts:

1. Taking My Tablet
2. Tablet @ Work – One Week In!
3. Vista on the Tablet

I re-install XP on my laptop every 6-8 weeks and most weeks have one or two customer’s machines on the go, so it’s definitely something I have a little bit of knowledge about.

The page is in draft form still – have a look and let me know .

Installing Windows XP

Related posts:

1. Digital Content Strategy
2. Flattened