bunker an infrequent blog

Partly for my own memory, and partly for what seems to be lots of people having Bootcamp problems when installing XP:

Problem: Nice clean Bootcamp partition – Check! Nice clean pukka XP SP2 disk – Check! Install and go… nuts – what is this C: \windows\system32\hal.ddl corrupt or missing you speak of? Ekk! Knowing *nothing* about this level of windows hacking I’m off to a bad start here. Here’s how i got it working on my MBP.

Fixes: Apparently some people have had luck waiting till the setup off CD lets you hit ‘R’ and do some repair from the command line, specifically del C:\boot.ini … bootcfg /rebuild … fixboot

Apparently that has been know to work, but didn’t work for me – this did though: Back in OSX use the Bootcamp assistant to remove then recreate the partition. Then boot off your XP install CD and when setup gets to your disk selector, delete the Bootcamp partition, and delete the 200mb partition bootcamp has also quietly made. Then create a new windows formatted partition from here and install. All should proceed well this time.

I’m not entirely sure why this works but it does and I get to play Half Life 2 now. Yay!

So I’ve been entirely swamped for most of this year, working a minimum of two freelance gigs at once while keeping tabs on and shepherding TIOTI in the gaps. It has been exhausting and I’m starting to feel it, the breathers I get when I’m actually on top of all the things going on are too infrequent. So it’s time to get organised!

First thing is the hellish .Mac performance these past few months – Sync? You must be kidding. It’s rubbish, and I do rely on iCal to plan as well as record billable days. But its not working, nightmare. After messing with .mac sync once again i’m going to give MySync a whirl and report how that goes. I’m also going to try out OSX Leopard as that has entirely new syncing built in, and it’s retro-fittable to Tiger too. Report will follow.

Ok, so that’s my time, future and past, sorted. Next up, words and ideas. I’m trying out a few notetaking apps at the moment, to make sense of the far too much RSS surfing I do. Omni Outliner looks like the leader so far, but annoyed me by being seemingly unable to alphabetise a list of email addresses. Yo Jimbo looks good, has .Mac syncing of notes and deserves a more robust playing with. I’m also trying out Sidenote which sort of works for me but has a couple of bugs that have irked me already.

I’m going to give them all a week or two longer and see what works for me, but if anyone has suggestions, please tell.