Saturday, March 19, 2011

Upgrade to Windows 7

I have upgraded my Toshiba laptop to Windows 7. Long story short I have had some difficulties with opening web browsers, after many frustrating hours spent over the past several months, I decided to throw in the towel.

I installed Windows 7 Home Premium SP 1 x64 media. It was a very smooth upgrade, took about 1 hour this morning.

I was pleasantly surprised that it actually backed up my old OS first. All of my files are available under the new directory Windows.old, which contains the following dirs and their content from my old OS.
$Recycle.Bin
Documents and Settings
Program Files
Program Files (x86)
ProgramData
Users
Windows


So I get a clean new OS, and all the files from my old PC.

I sort of prefer the icons and desktop wallpapers from Vista, and they have all different ones bundled with Win 7.

For default desktop wallpapers, you can find them under:
C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper
You can create sub-directories, which I did for my Vista wallpapers from the same location in Windows.old. Windows 7 displays the sub-directories as sections in the default Desktop Background selection window.

For User Account pictures, I had to get some help from the web:
http://www.winhelponline.com/articles/238/1/Adding-a-custom-picture-to-the-list-of-user-account-pictures.html
The default User Account icons are under
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\User Account Pictures\Default Pictures
It does not seem that sub-directories are allowed for default User Account change picture selection screen.





Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Basic scientific explanation of Japan Fukushima nuclear plant disaster

On top of the tragedy from tsunami and earthquake, Japan is experiencing another potential catastrophe from a nuclear plant failure.

This article posted on the site of the MIT department of Nuclear Engineering goes into the basic details of the design of the plants at Fukushima and explanation of the events there over the last few days.

http://mitnse.com/2011/03/13/why-i-am-not-worried-about-japans-nuclear-reactors/

The only question I still have after reading this article was how long that they need to keep cooling the shut-down reactor core? Is it several days (so the end is in sight) or will it be weeks? Apparently it has already been 3-4 days at least.

I am also curious about the temperature / pressures involved. Apparently they are battling to stay under 1200°C, and that is with the heat mainly coming from radioactive decay rather than fission (if I understand correctly). If there were no coolant at all how hot could it get just from that?