Dreams Of Noise

I have three printers in the house. Two wireless.

For some reason, which I am unable to fathom, my desktop computer will print to none of them.

It will scan from the one.

I got the old (2008, Vista, aiee) laptop to print yesterday. Today... nothing. I got a couple of pages by plugging the wireless printer into the laptop, which kinda defeats the purpose. Couldn't scale the damn PDF properly. Designed something with Avery's site and software, and it couldn't match its own template. After I unplugged the USB and tried it in the main 'puter again (with no printing as the result), I plugged it back into the laptop. Now it won't print.

I have been trying to print some business cards and CD labels, basically, since MillenniCon.

I have spent more than three hours a day every day this week (including Sunday) trying to coax the printers into producing. Nothing useful. No. Thing. Uninstall, reinstall, scour, expunge, download new drivers, find the original CD, doesn't effing matter.

They. Do. Not. Work.

Oh, pardon me, the iPad can print easily. Although I don't have any good app to play with the PDF, so I can't scale the doc properly, and I really don't want to learn another app today, I have shit to do.

I don't know what the fuck to do at this point.

Sorry, I just really had to vent.

How's your day?

I'm dealing with mobo sound right now -- it's not bad, but it's not fantastic. So I figured I'd try to reinstall my Rocketfish RF-71SDCD sound card, even though it's known to have problems with Windows 7. Surely they've fixed the drivers by now...?

No, they haven't. And don't call me Shirley.

I will not detail the clicks, pops, stutters, and window-hopping I did, trying to get this stupid thing working. It was great for WinXP, but with Win7/64 it's a bust. Sigh.

Anybody know a good sound card that works well with Win7/64, that's not too awfully expensive? By the time my birthday rolls around, I should be able to get it.

ETA: Well, hey. Now I'd like some personal experience with cards on Win7/64.

From pancreatic cancer, at the age of 56. Pretty much no details at this point. Condolences to his friends and family.

Dude changed the world. Not a lot who can say that.

Thanks to the vagaries of algorithms, a famous text on flies was briefly listed on Amazon for $23,698,655.93 (+$3.99 shipping).

Gotta love computers -- they don't do what you want, only what you tell them.

What's your latest twitchy software story? I've got a problem with USB drives not being recognized (I think it's a glitchy cable), and -- after several tries in the past -- my Win7x64 has finally recognized ASIO4ALL.

The Commodore 64, reborn.

Stupid Creative.

The mobo sound clicks way too much. It could be that I haven't installed ASIO on here yet, but it just doesn't sound right. So, the Creative X-Fi Xtreme Gamer board is back in. Can't find the disk, though.

I downloaded the right driver, installed, rebooted... and up popped something saying Would you like us to check for updates? Figuring this would get me a few apps that I wanted without me trying too hard, I said yes. Aaaaaand now it's taking an estimated two hours plus for a couple hundred MB of files from their glacial servers. With no option to cancel, and having apparently overwritten my previous install of the drivers.

If this POS slows down my computer by even a jot, I'll strip out everything but just the main driver.

Gaaaaaaaah.

So which software installs do you hate, or love? I am sick to the teeth of Apple, Divx, and a number of smaller companies having A Wonderful Plan For Your Life and being determined to inflict it on you at every opportunity. You know, like RealPlayer used to be. (The problem with Divx is that the Divx Update program crashes a lot. I've got better things to do with my processor cycles than nursemaid buggy crap updaters.) And oh my frickin Cthulhu the Native Instruments Service Center.

On the other hand, FileZilla (which has its own problems, unfortunately) and Notepad++ are amazing, installing and restarting themselves with nary a glitch. Firefox and Chrome are pretty good. And Reaper's a dream. It doesn't auto-update, but it lets you know very politely when there's a new version, and it's only a few MB download, and it installs right over it with no problem. Heh. Winamp does exactly the same thing, but somehow Winamp's update notice annoys the heck out of me where Reaper's doesn't.

ETA: Gaaaaaaaah. There's some glitch I haven't run into before, that basically hoses my card (X-Fi Xtreme Gamer) on XP SP3. Somehow, my previous install avoided it. This one hasn't, and oy is it common, frustrating, and damn near unsolvable. So I will see if ASIO4ALL will help the mobo audio.

Dammit, I do not want to have to do a full reinstall. Not now. But it's beginning to look that way.

I took the desktop to the local computer store ("local" in this case meaning literally three miles down the road, thank FSM) and determined that it wasn't the power supply, and it wasn't the video card. Something in the CPU or motherboard or memory. It'll cost $35 and a couple of days to narrow it down.

Heck with that. I can get a new CPU and motherboard for about a hundred bucks at MicroCenter in Madison Heights, and just swap everything out. I will most likely do that tomorrow -- I have some music I MUST work on today.

I have found conflicting versions of what this will do. Some online reports suggest you have to do a full reinstall (not gonna happen). Others refer to a repair install (if I can find the disk). The most optimistic say that WinXP SP3 will simply load the default drivers until you get the proper mobo drivers in place. Any insight as to that?

Ohhhhh, I do not need this. Not now.

Desk computer is giving me problems which seem to indicate either the power supply or the graphics card, I think the former. The main hard drive is also making little chirping noises, that sound like some kind of lubrication problem. FSM save me if it's contact. The drive is still reading, so I'm currently backing it up completely.

It's a few days before Dragon*Con and I have to burn CD-Rs, I'm trying to finish a commission job, and I'm working on a special project with OVFF, along with all the other stuff. I do not need this.

How's your computer behaving lately?