Desktop, Notebook and Netbook.

Over the past few days I have been busy with computers. My desktop, the company's notebook and my GF's netbook. 

First, the desktop. I unpacked my desktop from the bubble wrap last Friday as I needed some pictures that were sitting on its hard drive. Upon booting... this bald old man forgot his password. Alamak... I tried every single password I could think of and all its permutations but to no avail. Finally, desperate... I scoured the net for a utility to crack the password. The download was fairly large but I tell you...  the results... amazing... the application cracked my password in less than 5 minutes. It turned out to be an abbreviated version of one of my passwords. I then spent the balance of the day updating the desktop... OS, applications, antivirus and what nots. I must say it is still pretty zippy. The machine itself is probably 5 years old... a Pentium D which I made some upgrades to and also upgraded to Vista Business. 

It currently has 1.5GB of RAM and I think an upgrade is on order coupled with a kick-ass 23" inch LCD screen... whoa! This is the 23" LCD screen I borrowed from the F&B team. I definitely could get used to this. I think I'll go buy one soon. It's about RM500 I think.

Next... my notebook or rather the company's notebook. The original specs was Core 2 Duo 1.66GHz, 120GB HDD, 512MB RAM and Windows XP. Yeah, I know... piece of crap. This was back in October 2007. When I received it I told the IT guy not to install the Windows XP. Instead I bough an OEM Windows Vista and installed it. I then upgraded the RAM to 2 x 1GB. I then bought the OEM version of MS Office 2007 and installed it as well. I have many other applications installed in it as well... my Photoshop, antivirus, performance utilities, etc. Last year I upgraded it further by installing Windows 7 on 64-bit platform and then changed the RAM to 2 x 2GB. The notebook is running well with the excepton of the intermittent screen flickers which is a sign that the screen will fail soon... how soon? Only God knows...

So... when I decided I wanted to leave the company I enquired with the VP of Finance on what it would cost me to acquire this unit since I had invested so much into it. She then consulted the VP for IT who said the value was RM1,500.00 based on the original specs. Ummm... Fuck you... add RM400 and I can get a brand new kick-ass machine... and probably an i3 processor too. So, I told the VP of Finance... thanks but no thanks. I will pay no more than RM500 for this machine and that's being generous. That was about a month back. So, I have started to move my files from the notebook and getting it ready for 'execution'... putting it back to the state in which I received it. Yeah, I know.... I'm such an arsehole... I have a buyer for my RAM. The applications? Too bad... they're non-transferable.

Today, the VP of Finance learns about my 'early departure'. She wants to see if she can do something for me as she felt bad for what has happened to me so she's going to have a word with my boss on doing something about this notebook as a gesture of my 11 years of service. So sweet of her. She's an ok person... just that I never agreed with her methods in doing her job. I understand her job but her methods are horrendous. So... I'm waiting to see if the 'execution' will be necessary.

The netbook... I bought it last year to keep Ayu occupied and for her to learn to be IT savvy... like yours truly. It came with Windows XP and running on an Atom processor... it was not as zippy as I was used to. Then I learnt about Windows 7 and I installed the RC (Release Candidate) and upgraded the RAM to 2GB. Definitely better than Windows XP. So... RC is a trial version... as of 1st March it started shutting down every 2 hours and by July it will be unusable. 

So... it's either back to WIndows XP, buy a Windows 7 or...

I have been considering buying a Mac ever since I got busy with my photography and I will eventually get it... pretty soon too. Just waiting Apple to change their processors. So... as usual when I buy stuff I normally do lots of research on the product I am going to buy. I starte dreading about Macs and found out that I could actually convert my S10 to a Mac! Wow!

So... my ex IT guy and I embarked on this... Hackintosh...

It was quite a nightmare. We spent a good two hours trying to figure out how to proceed with the installation as we could not see the 'Continue' tab as the program was not meant for such a small resolution screen. Eventually, I managed to Google some instruction on how many 'Tabs' and 'Spaces' to hit to get it to install. 

The installation itself was quite fast. I think in all it took about 30 minutes. Just about the same time required as installing Windows.

Here you go... Max OS X on a Lenovo S10. After installation, to my horror all the hardware did not work... keyboard, wi-fi, touchpad, everything... except sound. I plugged in a USB mouse and it worked. So I fooled around a bit trying to upgrade the version. It's getting late so I have to continue this tomorrow.