Tag Archives: windows

WordTsar

I read WordTsar Is Reviving the ’80s WordPerfect Writing Experience with considerable interest, but following it up with a look at WordTsar and WordTsar: Wordstar for the 21st Century quickly showed that the first author was not present during the word processor wars of the 1980s. WordStar lost to WordPerfect in that conflict, but still has some diehard fans, the most famous being George R.R. Martin, who still uses it on a DOS machiue. I have been able to run WordStar on FreeDOS, with FreeDOS running on a virtual machine. This was WordStar 4.0, which is now “abandonware,” i.e. free, but without any official support.

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More about the new(er) ThinkPad

The 256GB drive on Another ThinkPad seemed a little small, so I replaced with 1 TB SSD. As in previous moves, I used Macrium under Windows to copy the contents of the existing drive to the new one, then rebooted into Linux and used gparted to add a new NTFS partition and a new ext4 partition on the larger drive. Following Lenovo ThinkPad X240 – Hard Disk Drive Replacement I physically removed the old SSD and installed the new one. Afterwards I rebooted into Windows and the new NTFS partition showed up as the D drive as planned.

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Reinstalling Windows

I have an old (2011) Lenovo ThinkPad which I used for various tests that I have documented in these pages. At some point the Windows installation on it got corrupted. I tried reinstalling Windows from the recovery drive that I had created, but that failed. So I tried again with a USB drive that I had created using the Windows Media creation tool. I think I had created this on another system, but it worked just fine after I put in old Windows activation code for the system. It took a while to download all the Windows updates it needed, but I expected that.
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Programming in Pascal

Back in 2021 I wrote about APL, a computer language that I used early in my career. I have not seriously worked with it in the last 30 years, but it is still around.

Recently I read that Apple Just Released Code for Its 40-Year-Old “Lisa” Computer. This sentence caught my eye.

Much of the code is written in Pascal, an early programming language dating back to 1970, which was also used for some of the Mac’s early software.

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Firefox problem with Ubuntu

Following up on Jammy Jellyfish and System Updates I have been using Tyrone, my newer Ubuntu 22.04 system, for my daily work. In doing so I found an issue with Firefox: The “Save page as” “Print/Save to PDF” commands were not working on that machine under Ubuntu. I tried various Firefox troubleshooting options, but they did not help. The commands work fine with Firefox under Windows, and also with Firefox under Ubuntu 22.04 on another system (Donegal), which, however is an upgrade from 20.04 rather than a clean install. I even tried uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox

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Installed ChromeOS Flex

I have a Lenovo ThinkPad X130e laptop. It came with Windows 10 Home Edition, which does not work nearly as well for me as the Profession Edition I have on other systems. It hangs frequently. I have also installed Ubuntu Linux on it, which does better.

These days Chromebooks are everywhere, so I have become curious about Google’s Chrome OS Flex, the installation of which can turn an ordinary old (but not too old) PC into a Chromebook. Continue reading