It saddens me to report that since this morning the dinosaurs are officially extinct. My pet dino, who so faithfully warmed my feet for all these years, has died. After years of loyal service, being started after the last 2 ½ weeks of rest must have been too much for the poor creature and it quietly passed away in its sleep.
This left me in somewhat of a pickle as there was a darned good reason for me switching it back on, as I needed to edit some files. A quick post mortem indicated the cause of death was a blown capacitor which pretty much stuffed the motherboard. Shame as where do you find a decent Socket A motherboard nowadays? eBay probably, but is it worth putting more money into this old beast… probably not.
Computer always break down at the most inconvenient moments and I really don’t have the time to wait for replacement parts. That’s why it’s so important to make backups. There are two types of people.
Those who backup and those who have yet to lose everything to a system crash. As I did almost lose everything in a hard disk crash a couple of years ago, only some advanced recovery tools, a 24 hour stint in the freezer and a lot of patience saved my bacon, I do make regular backups.
Problem is I only backup my important documents onto a network drive, and although that keeps my files relatively safe it doesn’t help me with all the programs that are installed on the computer that I need to edit the files. I’m sure I have the original installation CDs somewhere but as I haven’t needed them for years I wouldn’t have a clue where they are now.
Probably somewhere in the loft or the garage with all my other boxes I haven’t bothered to unpack since I moved in with my girlfriend. I do have an image of the installation partition but that is so old that it would take hours to run the updates alone.
I could have probably put the hard disk in my girlfriend’s desktop computer and reinstalled Windows XP over existing installation. This would solve the failed start-ups Windows XP would suffer from being transplanted to an entirely different platform and would have left the software intact. It would have left my girlfriend without a computer which is so not an option. Instead I turned to the N50 for some unprompted virtualisation.
I did mention in my first blog post that I wanted to do some virtualisation experiments, however, this is not what I had in mind at all. But beggars can’t be choosers so I quickly requested a trial key for VMWare workstation and a little fiddling later with some screwdrivers and an IDE to USB convertor my dinosaur was back, all be it in a virtual form and horrendously slow.
The slowness surprised me somewhat as my original experiments with VMWare on my girlfriend’s laptop, which she uses for work, indicated virtualisation shouldn’t have been a problem what so ever. Considering the N50 is a lot faster than her laptop I had expect it to cope a lot better than this as hers had no problem what so ever.
After a little digging I found that some of the settings the enhance virtualisation on the hardware level had been disabled in the bios but switching these on made no difference what so ever. It seemed the old IDE to USB convertor was the bottleneck. Without sufficient disk I/O VM’s are just slow. It’s a good thing I neatly separate off my OS & Software onto a 20GB partition all on their own because if I had to convert the entire driver I would be looking at that screen till next Tuesday. Note to self, get a decent IDE / SATA to USB 2.0 convertor.
During the conversion I kept myself occupied by trying out some more augmented reality tools. I realise the picture of myself with a transformer head might not be the best example of what you can do with augmented reality so here is a better example. It might not be an actual dinosaur and it cannot keep my feet warm but it’s certainly cute.
Once the conversion was done and the IDE to USB convertor was taken out of the equation the N50 was finally able to show me what it could really do VM wise. To my surprise the virtual copy of my old dinosaur was actually considerably quicker than the real deal (with exception of the graphics card).
Even with multiple VM’s running at the same time (Trial of Windows 2008 server, Ubuntu 9.04 and my dinosaur) the N50 was still able to serve websites without any problem what so ever. Overall a very respectable performance for an entertainment laptop which isn’t aimed at this type of use at all.
With the files edited and uploaded once more I should hopefully have some time to hopefully bring the dinosaur back in the flesh, Jurassic Park style. Although I guess it’s more Frankenstein style as it will involve more soldering and / or replacing of the motherboard than actual extracting the computer’s blood from a mosquito stuck in amber and cloning it. Nonetheless I’m sure it’ll make a mess. Let’s just hope that by my next blog post I can cry out “It’s alive”.
