Agony of Dafeet
a Pythonista’s weblog
Every month or two I would get complaints from my mother about how slow her computer ran. How it had been freezing and dropping the internet connection. Every few months I would personally locate a slew of Trojans and random malware on the computer. Her Norton Anti Virus license expired and so I installed AVG. Things were okay again.
Few months later I was called by her once again. The computer had been said by her was incredibly slow again. I discovered a “slick” piece of malware this time by the name of Antivirus professional 2009. This program would pretend it in fact was a genuine anti virus and firewall device. It had hijacked her net connection. It would inform the consumer of a detected virus it found and would demand $$$ to get rid of it. AVG did not get it and SpyBot had no fortune along with it either. This was the last straw for me personally. I became planning to reformat her computer and instead install Ubuntu.
The only problem was that she actually is an element of the Paltalk community. Palltalk is a chat client which she makes use of to all her friends with. Palltalk provides moderated stations where individuals can play their music with their buddies. It features a very big community. Palltalk is a windows only system though and I also was at for a surprise of how challenging this is likely to be. We dedicated a time to rebuild her computer and i also was down.
Computer specs 512 Mb RAM3000 Sempron AMD processorOnboard video card with shared ram
We stripped certainly one of my machines that are old bumped the computer to 1Gb of RAM and plugged in an ATI Radeon 9600 AGP video card I had laying around.
I utilized a 16Gb thumb drive to back up her documents and music. Burned a disk utilizing the latest version of Xubuntu 8.10. Explanation we selected Xubuntu over Ubuntu is it’s little memory f tprint, being it to run on an older computer that I needed.
Xubuntu install was flawless. Every thing worked perfectly with no tweaking. Video, noise and the card that is wireless out of the package. It was certainly the install that is easiest of a operating-system i have ever experienced!
We downloaded the version that is latest of Mozilla Firefox and installed Flash. Tried going to Paltalk Express, the notifications that are sound but there was clearly a concern with the streaming audio. I realized that it was due to missing Java help for Firefox. I got Java involved in Mozilla but there was still no sound in Paltalk Express. Java sound worked within my browser when gonna other Java applets with sound but no such luck 
in Paltalk Express. We attempted aoss also but had no luck. No real matter what I attempted I could perhaps not get Java sound streaming to function.
Paltalk express had a bug that is nasty well. Every once in a while when I tried to load it, the Firefox could not complete loading but would memory leak till the computer began to crawl. In order to fix the issue I might have to kill firefox, head to Flash Settings and delete the locally saved data and decide to try again. This is the true point of which I abandoned the thought of utilizing Paltalk Express.
Next thing to try was Wine. Wine is just a an amazing piece of software that has served me personally well plenty times prior to. I even managed to get Eve-Online going trough wine within the past that will be considering that is amazing Eve-Online client is far more advanced then the Paltalk customer. Paltalk client under Wine would log in to the solution but just when I attemptedto join a space it could freeze. I discovered there was a .dll lacking, and after a few hours of trying various things it was clear I becamen’t planning to have much fortune with getting Paltalk working under wine. We almost think individuals at Paltalk purposely worked to prevent Paltalk from ever focusing on such a thing other then Windows. In retrospect I do believe it didn’t work because Paltalk is dependent on ie to produce all it’s irritating adverts, when I ended up being getting exhausted I decided to stop on Palltalk under Wine.
It was time to give virtual machines a get. I’ve used Vmware four years ago and had generally speaking best of luck I needed to use Open Source alternatives with it but. I have tried QEMU first but Windows XP install hung towards the end.
Virtualbox had been next. Install worked perfectly. I had or windows 7 operating flawlessly inside of Xubuntu. Paltalk customer had been set up and working without any problems. Windows XP ended up being working great as being a guest system with 256Mb allotted to it in Virtualbox settings. And I instructed my mother never to make use of Windows for anything else other then Paltalk.
Windows XP performed great trough Virtualbox emulation, considering Virtualbox is really a processor emulator plus the Sempron 3000 does not support AMD-V technology.
In the Xubuntu part I installed Songbird (iTunes clone) as well as Catfish for quick finding of her music. And I shared her music folder with the Windows XP guest. I also installed Tkmixer as she is allowed by it to easily switch between mic or line as a noise input source.
Installing Virtualbox guest additions was a bit problematic. In guest window Devices -> Install Guest Additions.. the download link was broken. We went along to download.virtualbox /virtualbox/2.0.4/ and downloaded it manually. Then put it within the right location for the “Install Guest Additions..” to operate.
Once I had been done I made a back-up of her Virtualbox or windows 7 image (.vdi file). If any such thing should happen with her or windows 7 system because of virus disease or similar it will be described as a matter of rewriting the active .vdi file from the copy that is backup. A fix which calls for five minutes of my time and which is often achieved remotely.
She’s got been happy with Xubuntu. It t k some getting used to but she quickly learned her way around it. The computer performed better also in accordance with her. Due to both the hardware upgrades i did so along with the insufficient unnecessary pc software operating on the equipment.
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