LinuxFest Northwest, etc

Source

I'm writing from LinuxFest Northwest once more - right now I'm watching Jesse Keating present on git. The conference is really buzzing so far this year; I've been spending most of my time manning the Fedora booth, and the swag is disappearing like crazy and we've had people stacked three deep at times. It's always a good conference. Come find me and say hi if you're here! I'll be at the Fedora booth a lot both today and tomorrow. We have been signing people up for OpenShift accounts at a rapid pace: if you stop by and prove you have an OpenShift account, we'll give you a USB key that is ALSO a bottle opener. Or possibly a bottle opener that is ALSO a USB key. At least until we run out, which is likely to be soon. Of course, being at LFNW means yesterday I travelled to LFNW - it's just a train ride down from Vancouver. Being a giant idiot, I decided that 'five hours before the train to LFNW leaves' would be a great time to upgrade the CPU and memory in my husband's system. Yeah...turns out, not so much. Windows managed once more to stun me with its incompetence: after an hour of hardware wrangling I had everything hooked up and booting, but Windows was just stuck in a boot loop. It turns out that for some insane reason, a Windows install is kind of tied to the CPU: if you upgrade the CPU to one that's sufficiently different (though still the same architecture!), Windows stops booting. I mean....why. WHY?! It is apparently possible to escape from this situation, but it was now 30 minutes before the train to LFNW left, so I thought it was possibly not the best moment to be figuring out Windows' system recovery options. So followed a very hasty 30 minutes of further hardware wrangling, getting the old CPU and RAM back in. So I wasted an entire stressful afternoon to ultimately put everything back exactly the way it was before and rush to catch my train. D'oh.

Comments

Leslie Satenstein wrote on 2013-04-28 14:30:
I have been waiting for a Upstate NY fest (Albany, or Plattsburg) or even somewhat where 3.5 to 4 hours driving will get me there. Update Vermont, Burlington, Stow, or even my own city of Montreal would be great. I am certain that we could find a large auditorium for the venue of it was held in Montreal. Montreal is the home of UBISoft, and other Network system manufacturers as well as major applied electronics vendors (CAE flight simulators, Matrox, etc.)
Leslie Satenstein wrote on 2013-04-28 14:41:
Re why windows runs into problems is a good ponderation. Almost every vendor has a backdoor to the processor in which microcode patches can be loaded just after power-up time. Windows will have a processor dependent module with microcode updates or additions. I am not sure, a hardware guy could confirm this, but you could even create your own cpu instruction. Windows needs to reinstall cleanly so it detects the processor (perhaps even the processor cpu serial number). The serial number is present but rarely used because of what you did, "an upgrade"