Time to go to work. This is an image of yesterday evening. I was in a hurry to get home and see what I can do with my expensive brick, and this image just found me. I took seven different exposures until the framing was about perfect (it was not, I had to still do some slight cropping), and basically that was it for yesterday, photographically at least.
Now to the brick. With the help of a friend at work, I found that I had to delete all partitions on my hard drive, in order to make the VAIO boot from most bootable CDs that I threw at it. Funny. It booted just fine from a Windows 7 installation DVD, but for example it refused to boot from a vanilla XP installation CD. As soon as I deleted the partitions on the hard drive (as part of Windows 7 installation, but aborting the install immediately after the partitions were deleted), it would boot just fine from any bootable medium. XP would crash immediately, but at least the laptop suddenly accepted other boot media. What a weird BIOS!
But essentially that was what I needed. With the VAIO I had got a Windows XP downgrade option in form of an XP CD, and that was an XP customized to this hardware, with all the drivers, an XP that did not crash. As soon as I got home, I first installed XP, then under XP I performed the BIOS upgrade, and finally I installed Windows 7 again. Guess what? No blue screens of death any more 🙂
This morning I added some additional Sony software, some drivers, and now I’ve only one more problem: Sony provides no 64 bit Nvidia driver for the second graphics card, and Nvidia’s standard 64 bit notebook driver does not recognize the hardware. Hmm … more research to be done 😄
The Song of the Day is “Underneath The Streetlight” from Joni Mitchell’s 1982 album “Wild Things Run Fast”. I was amazed to see that this album seems to be unavailable via Amazon, being sold from $70 in the Amazon marketplace. One more of the marvels of the Capitalist religion: How can any Joni Mitchell album ever go out of print????
That’s like France closing the Louvre, locking away the Mona Lisa! They just have no right to do that. That’s our cultural heritage, not a damn asset!!!
Anyway. Here’s a video from Yahoo/Spain.