Helping family members with computer installations

I thougt I would quickly get my sister in law setup with a new Pentium 4 from a wholesale computer place and create a lekker XP/Ubuntu dual boot system for her.

 

Gettting the computer wasn't too much of a shlep. Phoned up the Indian guys at esquire and slashed together a Pentrium 4 Celeron / 256Meg / 80 Gig for R1800. Jenine picked it up from midrand and brought it to my house for a quick operation to get  all the software setup and running smooth. Well it turns out that Windows XP just kept resetting itself after it was installed - very weird. So I check the memory, pull out the TV card  ... same problem - or though it occasionaly boots - I hate intermittend problems with a passion!

 

After a couple of days including a weekend - I check that the blue screen of death says tht XP has an UNMOUNTABLE FILESYSTEM - I ponder this over a cup of rooibos and then think about these new fancy 80-core cables for the new harddrive and think about the CD-ROM which in connected as a slave on this fancy cable on IDE1. A lightbulb makes me think I should put the CD-ROM on a seperate old fhasion cable on IDE2 - and IT WORKS.

 

It cuased the weirdest things to haeppen which include:

 

1. XP Bluet screen of death occosionaly on startup

2. After installing Ubuntus Grub - system wouldn't startup the bootloader

3. Grub gave some weird errors for the OS

4. Trying to reinstall the MBR for XP from the recovery console had no effect

 

Moral of the story: When a family member says "Please help me with my computer quickly", tell them that you are really no good at this sort of thing and its best if they take it to the professional.

Useful scripts I have built

1. mame
This one is used to start xmame in full screen with all the right sound options

#!/bin/bash
xmame -x11 1 -sound -samples -audiodevice '/dev/audio' -mixerdevice '/dev/mixer' -alsa-pcm 'default' -dsp-plugin 'oss' -sound-mixer-plugin 'oss' $1

2. zxspectrum
I had all my zx spectrums games in zip archives, this script unzips them and calls xspect (linux spectrum emulator) with the unzipped game as its argument

#!/bin/bash
mkdir /tmp/zx
if [ $# -gt 0 ]; then
echo "Usage: zxspectrum "
fi
unzip $1 -d /tmp/zx
game=$(ls /tmp/zx/ | grep .*.'[tT]''[zZaA]''[pPxX]')
newgame=$(echo $game | sed -e 's/ /\_/g')
mv "/tmp/zx/$game" /tmp/zx/$newgame
zxgame=/tmp/zx/$newgame
xspect $zxgame
rm -r -f /tmp/zx

3.