Tom LaMantia

Windows Vista Review – Part 1

Today I did something I thought I would never do. I got windows vista. Some people would say I just came from the moon, as a large amount of people already have it. But with the blue screen of death and countless other problems, I was afraid to get it. My good old XP machine died yesterday (burnt out power supply), and I needed a new computer. Virtually every desktop on today’s shelves comes with Vista. It would have been possible to downgrade back to XP, but I thought I would see what this Vista thing is really about. So this is my review. Part 1 of I’m not to sure how many. But here goes:

Well the fact that you are reading this review is somewhat of a good sign. I’m surprised about the ease of setup so far. I had to install windows for the first time last night. Couldn’t have been more simple. I was expecting to stay up all night fighting with the computer, but that was not so. It basically installed itself. The DOS command prompt showed you what the machine was working on at the time. It said “cannot find specified file” a few times, but didn’t seem to be a problem. I liked the user/profile interface of XP so I went to set that up. For a guy with limited vista experience, it went well. My user profiles are up and running with out a hitch. Came with Internet Expoler 8 (Of course we cant do with that, can we? ). Firefox is working well.

My biggest issue lies with all the crapware. There’s this annoying acer “empowering technology” toolbar on my desktop. I will get rid of that as soon as I’m finished with this blog. It seems to be installing “important updates” quite often. I hope they really are important windows updates, not crapware. of course, this happens with any new computer. You just have to grin and bear it.

Next observation: speed and performance. Its running pretty fast. Not as fast as I expected, but still pretty good. Perhaps my expectations are too high. My only issue is to see if it slows down after a couple of weeks.

Next observation: It looks good. A LOT better than XP. Its much better on the eyes. Not as harsh and blocky.

Well that’s it for the first day. I will keep you posted.

Joomla! (Or WordPress) Manual Database Configuration

One thing I like to do when I work for hours and hours to solve a major problem/bug, is that I like to blog about it. This way I can document the solution, and allow others to solve the same or similar problems. So: you were happily going along (maybe adjusting) your database (like I was) and something goes horribly wrong. You go to your site and see the message. “Database error: cannot connect to MySQL.” Don’t worry. Now a lot of you are probably thinking by now “oh no, I have to reinstall”. This is not true. OK start by pulling out a backup of your database. Once you have that, simply make a new database. Using the “PHPmyAdmin” tool, select your new (empty at this point) database. Click on the “import” tab and select your backed up database. This should run a series of queries on the new database, and dump all your information into the new database. What we have just done, is create and identical database, but we have started from scratch allowing the site to connect to it again. Now, go back to your database wizard and create a new user for the database we just made. Remember the user name and password. OK, for all you Joomla! users find your “configuration.php” file. It should be somewhere in the root directory. If you are using WordPress the file is called “wp-config.php”. Whichever you are using set the permissions of that file to “777″. I know some of you are going “that makes my site venerable to hackers”. Yes it does, but we will changing the permissions back, in a few minutes. Now open that file up, and change the database name (to the new one we just made) and then change the database user (to that databases new user, the one you also just made). Next change the database password (to the password of the specified user). Your done! Go to your site and you should be connected and running again. This works whenever your database becomes, deleted, corrupted, or has missing files/incorrectly named files. As you can see, it is important to take lots of backups. If your backup is a month old, you loose a month of content, so take LOTS of backups. Your done!

Oh, and don’t forget to set the permissions of your configuration file back to the way they were!