Maintenance, November 2009

- Today was a beautiful time to work on the Frankenbike, it being Veterans' Day and sunny. Unfortunately, i spent the better part of the afternoon scouring the house for her key. Turns out it was still in the bike--not the ignition, which i had checked earlier, but the seat cover latch. Fantastic. Nonetheless, i now have a drill and a new clutch cable, meaning i can finally get into the crankcase to replace the damn thing.

- The folks let me know that Christmas (my 2007 Camry), and most Toyotas produced from 2004 onwards, have an unresolved "issue" that sometimes results in a stuck accelerator. Ruh-roh. This made news when an off-duty CHP and his family were killed due to a stuck accelerator in their Lexus. This raises the question of why a police officer didn't take the obvious steps to resolve the issue (shift to neutral and kill the engine), but not being in the car at the time it's hard to judge.

- I bought the Windows 7 upgrade at the student rate ($30) and installed it successfully...after eighteen hours of wrangling. Microsoft and Digital River really botched this one. I quite literally had issues at every single step of the install process, and ultimately had to resort to the good ol' double install trick* to get the damn thing working.

That being said, i'm incredibly happy with W7. It's a much slimmer OS than Vista, and Microsoft did a great job ironing out most of the kinks and inconsistencies of both Vista and XP. I also can run in XP mode for the ancient programs geology demands i use. Lastly, i'm up to 64-bit architecture now, and the processing boost is really, really great.

* If you do want to upgrade from 32-bit Windows Vista/XP to 64-bit Windows 7, Microsoft requires a clean install of a full-version of Windows 7, not the upgrade. This means an upgrade key won't work. There's a workaround for this, found here, that will let you use an upgrade key to do a clean install. This means anyone buying Windows 7 can get a full installer for the price of an upgrade--pretty sweet!