Dirt

[akirlu]

First post on my biggest birthday present. It's an incredibly (for me, anyway) teched out, brand new Dell Inspiron system, with dual everything, including this gigantic,extra-wide format flat screen monitor in truly glorious technicolor. It's zippy enough to be a plausible game machine, with quad processors and I don't know what all, plus a hard drive big enough to swallow our music collection without even needing to burp. So why, I want to know, is Internet Explorer s.l.o.w. .a.s. d.i.r.t.? Must check with Hal when he wakes up to find out if he's currently downloading the Library of Congress, or something, because my lag times should not be sucking like this.

Meanwhile I've been out in the yard doing a bit of weeding. I don't yet know too much about the growing properties of our dirt, but I do know it's good for growing dandelions. Big, strapping healthy dandelions, with roots like white baby carrots. And either it is also good for growing earth worms, or else the earth worms really, really like hanging around at the bottom of a dandelion. At any event, every time I manage to get the taproot up with the leaves, there's an earthworm at the bottom. I generally tap off the dirt and the worms and just toss the dandelion proper in the wheelbarrow.

It took remarkably few dandelions to fill the barrow. Admittedly that's in part because I also relented and pulled up some of the wild geraniums and forget-me-not that have run rampant in the herb bed. They were over-shadowing my oregano and choking the mint, if you can believe that. It's still hard to consider forget-me-not and wild geranium (and buttercups and sweetpea and daisies) as weeds, even when they're growing where I don't want them. I've let them take over because I find it so charming to have wildflowers in the yard. I should probably look into seeding the Back 40 in wildflowers, instead. That part of the yard isn't good for much else, anyway.

Meanwhile I lied about this being the first post off the Inspiron. The lag speeds got too much and I had to switch to the Eee while Hal looks at the Dell. He thinks it might be the free trial copy of McAffee that's throttling back the network speeds, but it's possible we'll need to dump Vista as well. *sigh*

Comments

[urlgirl.livejournal.com]

It's probably a mix of McAffee and the windows update client. I'd watch it for a few days, and at different times of the day, before you decide on dumping Vista.

Slooow

[hal-obrien.livejournal.com]

It looks like it was the McAfee. I've ditched that, and gone to my usual combo of Windows Defender and CA Anti-Virus (which I've used ever since being at MSFT, on the theory that dogfood really does work, and the only large breakout I can think of on campus was when Slammer showed how many unpatched copies of SQL Server the devs had running).

Re: Slooow

[urlgirl.livejournal.com]

To this day, I still use a combo of AVG and Windows Defender. It works :-) The CA works too, it's just a tad heavier.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

As Hal implies, it's much better now. Switching to Firefox with the ad blocker probably didn't hurt any, but as far as I'm concerned McAffee (at least with the out-of-the-box settings) is the anti-Christ. I was playing whole games of Mah-Jongg tiles waiting for a page to load. That is not an exaggeration.

[richardthe23rd.livejournal.com]

Although, whenever anyone talks about dumping Vista I feel a touch of envy.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Well, the Vista is rather visually ravishing, I'll give it that, but so far it seems a lot less stable than XP. In fact, I'm back on the Eee PC again while Hal's poking around under the hood of the Inspiron again, after the system locked up for the third time today. I'm hoping that turning off the Google widgets will help, or putting on the first patch to Vista, but at the moment the frustration is rapidly overwhelming the call of the pretty. Pretty only goes so far, in the absence of basic functionality.

[richardthe23rd.livejournal.com]

My screen has a habit of momentarily going black as the video controller fails and then recovers itself, apparently a new feature of Vista which making sure to install the latest video controller fails to undermine. The operating system will also just crash and reboot itself every now and then.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Oh, yay, more fun things to look forward to. Am I to take it that the envy you mention above is because you *can't* ditch Vista?

[richardthe23rd.livejournal.com]

I suppose where there's a will there's a way, but all the new machines I was shopping for had Vista already installed, and I'm on the upgrade path of least resistance.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Ah, I getcha. Yes, I guess if I didn't have in-house tech support, I might not bother with it either. But FYI, at least with my computer, at least so far, re-installing Vista from OEM discs, and only selectively re-installing the other bundled software, seems to be improving stability and system speed even while still running Vista. So that might be an option to consider.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

When we lived in Edmonds, my dad had this thing kind of like a pogo stick where he put it on a dandelion and turned it and it brought the whole thing up. It sounds a lot faster than pulling by hand, but I don't know if it's still made. Oh, here it is! Or something similar. I'm pretty sure his wasn't "as seen on TV."

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Oh, I use a weed puller -- Grandpa's Weeder -- it works by leverage rather than twisting but it does a good job with most weeds. Pulling by hand I save for the ones that are located in such a way that the puller can't get into the ground to grab 'em.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Oh, good. I was afraid you were pulling them all out by hand!

[farmgirl1146.livejournal.com]

Happy Post Birthday.

What a sweet birthday gift. I am finding the internet sloooow no matter which system I use. When I switch to Explorer from Firefox it gets even slower.

The weed puller thing that mjlayman mentioned is great. We have one. I have seen them recently at Greenwood Hardware. Since they are a True Value, I assume the True Value in your neighborhood would have one too. They are great.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, the 'puter is a very nice toy. All in all I had a very fine birthday this year, and thanks for the birthyday wishes.

I'm pretty sure we do have a True Value hardware in the area, but I tend to go to McClendon's when I can just because they are a genuinely local chain. At any event, we do already have a weed puller that I like a lot: Grandpa's Weeder.