Greywind is Dead. Long Live Talon!

[Arioch]

Well, Greywind's reign didn't get her any pinups or lunchboxes, but Talon is a major character in chapter 2, so I guess you'll get plenty of "lovin'".

I'm sorry to say that Ashrain doesn't appear again until chapter 3. But I think she's due for a holiday pinup this year.

Huh, I always figured that you, as a software developer, would be into computers enough to build your own. Not interested in the hardware side, not enough time, or what?

It used to be prior to about 2000 that it was a hands-down cost/performance benefit to build a custom system from components. This was when a good system cost $2000-3000 in parts, and a storebought system of equivalent capability cost quite a bit more, and often included parts you didn't want. Starting around 2000, thanks to retailers like Dell who would essentially sell you a quality system that you'd configured yourself from name-brand parts for close to the cost you'd pay to assemble and configure it yourself, spending the time and hassle of building the system yourself ceased to make financial sense.

Another advantage to system building was that you could assemble backup systems out of the leftover spare parts, but the rapid pace of change whithin the last 10 years has made that difficult.

Take pictures!

Will do sir!

[NOMAD]

I'm sorry to say that Ashrain doesn't appear again until chapter 3. But I think she's due for a holiday pinup this year.

sweet X-mas came early

[GeoModder]

sweet X-mas came early

Hallo-ween?

[Count Casimir]

I'm sorry to say that Ashrain doesn't appear again until chapter 3. But I think she's due for a holiday pinup this year.

There really is a Santa Claus! He's real!

[Arioch]

System shipped today, hopefully I will have it tomorrow afternoon.

[Hālian]

All hail Talon, Countess in The Box and Fifth Loroi Emperor-elect

[Arioch]

Didn't arrive today. Should arrive tomorrow.

[Absalom]

Didn't arrive today. Should arrive tomorrow.

Sounds like my paycheck.

[Arioch]

Still hasn't arrived. I guess FedEx is unclear on the definition of "next business day."

[GeoModder]

Lots of State Holidays in early September?

[Arioch]

Yay! It finally arrived. Appears to be working; I'm posting from it right now.

[Suederwind]

Yay! It finally arrived. Appears to be working; I'm posting from it right now.

Congratulations!
I hope it works as good as expected (or better).

[Southern Cross]

Congratulations seconded.....

[Arioch]

Thanks. Things are going reasonably well; I have completed most of the data backup and now I'm reinstalling applications. I'm guessing it will take most of the weekend to get things back to a usable state.

Having paid for Microsoft Office what must be 6 or 7 times, I declined to re-purchase it yet again, so I'm looking into alternatives. Any recommendations?

I'm pretty pleased with Windows 7 thus far. I had been previously using a borrowed Windows 8 laptop for a little while, and I was not pleased with it at all. And it's extremely nice having a non-crippled computer after so long (what? I can do more than one thing at once??).

I used a 500 GB Seagate Backup Plus drive for weekly backups on the old system; it seems to have backed things up well, but I had serious trouble trying to restore the data. The Seagate Dashboard software is obtuse, slow as a pig, and even after I figured out how to use it properly, was incapable of restoring a single drive image from the 29 incremental backup images, so I had to spend the better part of a day piecing it together manually. Very disappointing from what seemed like a nice product. And from what I understand, you can't use Windows 7's native backup with the Backup Plus either, because it uses a non-standard formatting scheme.

It was interesting to see how much data I have.

66 GB - My Art
11 GB - My Documents
12 GB - Website stuff
28 GB - Images
30 GB - Music
13 GB - Misc Downloads
02 GB - Code

[Suederwind]

Having paid for Microsoft Office what must be 6 or 7 times, I declined to re-purchase it yet again, so I'm looking into alternatives. Any recommendations?

The last free Office software I used daily was Libre Office (Link) about 1 1/2 years ago. It was not perfect, but that might have changed as they seem to have put a lot of work in it. However, I got a free version of the newest MS Office in the meantime and haven't tried Libre Office since then. There might be still problems with displaying or saving documents originally created in MS Office (especially Excel or Powerpoint), as well as displaying or editing Documents created with Libre on MS Office.
But whats wrong with your old MS Office versions? Not working on Windows 7 or are they coupled with your old computer in some way?

[Hujedamig]

I've used Open Office for some time now. It does the job well, and can save/open all the known formats I have come across.

[Arioch]

I'm mostly back up and running; Photoshop and Lightwave are installed and appear to be working.

But whats wrong with your old MS Office versions? Not working on Windows 7 or are they coupled with your old computer in some way?

That's always an option. But since the version of Office that came with Greywind is from 2006, I thought I'd check out what's available from this decade. Talon comes with a 30-day trial for Office 365 (the subscription-based version), and so I have something to use in the short term, but I can already tell I don't like it. It uses the ugly Windows 8 visual style, for starters.

[fredgiblet]

OpenOffice is very robust and feature complete unless you use VBA or do extremely in-depth things. LibreOffice is a spin-off of OpenOffice created because some of the people who worked on OpenOffice were concerned about Oracle owning Sun who own OpenOffice. Either one should handle any low to medium complexity office job and most high-complexity jobs just fine. LibreOffice is a little more free (as in speech) but the differences are pretty minor.

[Southern Cross]

I use OpenOffice 4.0.0 myself.

[Mikk]

LibreOffice is a little more free (as in speech) but the differences are pretty minor.

Actually, the difference is most likely huge. (Best to ignore comparisons into the past beyond 2 years, but the differences in the near-term are big). Unlike Apache (and previously Oracle) OpenOffice, LO took a 'radical' course of determined code-clean up, from around the moment of forking, so now they have more developers to maintain a smaller (less than a third of AOO) code base. The future for LibreOffice users looks brighter, altho, OO seems to be boasting smaller full-suite installation sizes for some reason (from my limited first glance anyway, on my system AOO might be 2/3 the size).

I consider myself fortunate that both suites are too much more than I need, so I don't even install partial-suite of LibreOffice these days, Abiword and Gnumeric will do.

But for Arioch? I'd probably suggest LibreOffice, without the java-requiring Base database management thingy. Avoiding RTF as a file format is a recommendation I shall give everyone, just in case.

Edit: didn't like a comma.