Found my old discs and spent a couple of hours the other day making virtual drives for DOS 6.2, Windows 3.1/95/98/2000/NT 4.0 & XP. Can’t believe I kept all those old “Operating Systems” but it was fun installing them and playing around with them. Especially DOS. I used to be known as the ’batch king’ cause I could write a .bat file to do most anything. (For you young Windows Freaks, a .bat file was the .cmd file of the day!) Even installed some of the old programs I wrote on the DOS drive. My Medical Tickler Management System, written for dbase III+ and compiled with Quicksilver (I think), still worked as it was meant to. Didn’t blink once at the date being beyond 2000 (Y2K fears). Playing with Windows 3.1 is a crack up! Wish I could find my old Windows 1 discs…

Not too much going on around here. Cold rainy day out. WeatherLiars swear it’s going to be 80 degrees Thursday, 85 degrees Friday and a possibility of 90 degrees Saturday. Sure. And if my grandmother had wings she’d be a Greyhound Bus. But I’m hoping anyway!!!

Last Sunday I wasn’t feeling too good when I woke so I skipped church. Hated to miss it on Mother’s Day cause I know they do special things for all the Mothers in the congregation. Felt okay enough to get out to the property late that afternoon. Brought back that last load of wood I cut last week.

Yesterday made a run to the bank and COSTCO. Bought one of those USB Turntables for SWMBO so she can rip her old albums to mp3 files. And I gotta admit she impressed me greatly yesterday. She assembled the turntable, hooked it up to her laptop, installed the software and ripped her first album without calling on me once! Too cool! Guess she has picked up a few things through osmosis!!

Since I’ve basically been stuck in the house today, except for a quick trip to Staples for blank cd’s and dvd’s, I’ve been backing up all the .avi files I’ve made since the last time I spent all day doing this very same thing. Re-ripping Smallville Season 6 to 720p format .avi’s and backing them up. Trying to get all the stuff on my MediaCenter that I don’t have backed up backed up. I’d HATE to have to re-rip and reconvert all those movies and shows. That would be a lot of work! And as for that MediaCenter: I still can’t get the ATI Radeon 9000 card to use both the monitor and tv at the same time. One or the other right now; but not both. Had it working before I rebuilt the system and it seems like I should be able to get it working agian. Every time I start Catalyst in advanced mode the damned computer reboots though. (Yes, I’ve uninstalled, rebooted and reinstalled to no avail.)

Used a program called “NLite” and created an autoinstall Windows XP .iso file. Works great unless the disc you want to install to hasn’t been fdisked. Tried it out (with VMWare) and it worked quite good. Now I gotta figure out how to have it install my drivers and the programs I normally use. That’s 500Gb of stuff! No, I think I’ll leave it as a generic XP system for when I upgrade my computer (which I do about every 2 years). Of course, I could Ghost my system; but I’m not sure it would fit on one dvd for storage. Think I’ll check that out…