kevin_standlee | Too Cold and Wet for Outside Chores

This morning we have freezing rain in Mehama, so it seems unlikely that we'll get any more "outside" chores like cutting more of the old telephone pole done today. Brr!

Last night and today, we're working on trying to bring back to life some of the hard drives on Lisa's computers. Here's an odd thing: she has one IBM T30 she can't use because it doesn't have a touch-pad, but it will boot. We cloned its hard drive. The clone wouldn't boot, but if I booted from the Windows CD and ran FIXBOOT, the clone worked just fine. A couple of other drives seemed to only need to have FIXBOOT run on them, but one of them began throwing STOP 7A and other my-drive-is-dying errors, so I suggested to Lisa that she get any files off of it that she can -- the drive is more or less readable as a non-booting device -- and discard it.

We'd install from scratch on a larger drive, except that for some reason any installation from scratch comes with the default setting of maximizing all windows, and Lisa very much does not want this. It's a tremendous pain in the neck to keep having to reset computers, and it's also frustrating that -- if our online searches are telling us anything -- that nobody else considers this a problem. We've found lots of ways of forcing all new windows to maximize, but hardly anyone seems to think it's worthwhile for new windows to not be maximized.