strange_complex | Entries tagged with computers

I'm feeling pretty chuffed with myself on the technology front today. I have:

Finally got my DVD-video and Sky-box to talk to one another. It turned out that I'd got it all set up right in the first place, but just needed to choose the A1 channel on the DVD-video machine instead of letting it sit on channel 1.
Convinced my BT Home Hub to supply full wireless coverage to my entire house, rather than just a 2m pool immediately around it. Those people who said that the key to doing this was changing the channel it was broadcasting on (dakegra first, I think, confirmed by kernowgirl's husband) were really right. Setting it to channel 6 completely transformed it from basically not really working at all to working absolutely perfectly everywhere I could want it to. Amazing.

However, I still have a technological question:

Having recently bought my laptop from Dell, I want to take advantage of their partnership with ReCOM to recycle my old desktop PC to charity. I've checked that it meets their requirements, and established what I need to do to get it collected, but obviously it's crucial to ensure that it is data-safe before it goes out of my house. So far I have:

Uninstalled pretty much every piece of software I ever installed on it, with the exception of harmless ones like Adobe Acrobat
Told both IE and Firefox to clear all my personal data (passwords, browser history, favourites etc.)
Manually deleted all internet cache files, cookies etc. just to be sure
Wiped all my old documents, pictures and music (after copying them to my new machine, natch) and all temp files
Emptied the Recycle bin
Defragmented the hard drive

For the record, I never used anything other than web-based email accounts from it, so there shouldn't be old emails stored anywhere on it.

Is there anything else I should be doing before I let someone else have it? Or is rendering what was my primary personal and work computer for a total of six years truly data-safe so difficult to do properly that I'd be better off smashing the hard-drive with a hammer and taking it to the tip?

1. Ah, I love summer rain. Which is good, as according to pretty much every weather report I've seen, it's going to carry on for the rest of our lives. Including to my cousin's wedding, which is happening in Folkestone not-this-Saturday-but-next. I bought a very lovely, if rather revealing dress - and to think I was worried about getting sunburnt! I might have to look for a matching umbrella.

2. Tomorrow morning, a man is bringing me a shiny new laptop! Hooray! I chose a mid-range one, on the basis that it's not intended to be my main computer, so it would be silly to go crazy with it. But it should still be rather exciting.

3. I have been trying to book opera tickets, but the Leeds Grand Theatre online booking service isn't working for me, and when I phone their so-called box office, all I get is an answerphone. Still, on the plus side, the guy they got to record their messages has a voice just like Christopher Lee. Yummy....

4. Update - and in fact just now while I was typing, they phoned me back, and the booking is all sorted now. Yay! #I'm going to see Michael Maniaci, I'm going to see Michael Maniaci!# Will mail people who are coming with details of the tickets shortly.

I can take screen-caps using the DVD player on my computer, but in order to do so, I have to disable something called 'hardware motion compensation'. This means that whenever I think "Ooh, must get a screen-cap of that!", the thought is almost always followed by "Ah, but I'd have to do that disabling thingy, wouldn't I? Gah, maybe I don't really need that screen-cap after all."

What I'd like to know, therefore, is how important hardware motion compensation actually is, and whether I could get away with just leaving it off all the time? Can anyone advise?

BTW, my computer is a desktop, and I never move it around anywhere. If that even has anything to do with hardware motion compensation...

Last night, I successfully took the old, clapped-out DVD drive out of my computer, and replaced it with a new one, which worked perfectly straight away! Rah!

I have never done anything which involved physically opening up my computer and doing stuff inside it before, and while I recognise that on the scale of things, what I did was not actually hard, I was still impressed that I managed to do it without breaking anything.

I was also interested to see just how much of what is inside my computer (it is a 'tower' type PC) is actually empty space. How does it still manage to be so heavy? That's what I want to know. I gave it a bit of a dust-out while I was in there, as it looked like it needed it, but only on plain metal surfaces like the bottom of the case: not anywhere that looked important or delicate.

I shall now at last be able to watch Christopher Lee's 1998 film, Jinnah, which I bought on DVD about 4 months ago, and haven't been able to see yet. He reckons it's his 'most important' film to date, so it should definitely be seen. I might just watch it tonight, in fact... It is a toss-up between that and another episode of Gormenghast on video: but either way, I get Christopher Lee Action^TM - yay!