Copy Your Hard Drive with Windows 7

I got a new SATA hard drive and decided to make it my primary drive. My current hard disk was IDE and was pretty old, so the decision made sense. But I really didn't want to reinstall everything, so I looked into copying the old hard disk into the new one. This is called Disk Cloning and there are lots of programs that do this. I just wanted the easiest way.

I first looked into Hiren's Boot CD because I had used Hiren's Recovery Tools before. You burn a CD, boot from it, and one of its tools clones the hard drive. I was too lazy to create a boot CD, so I read on. I read about Clonezilla, Aconis (not free), and Paradigm (maybe free?), which all required you to make a system image (a file that's a snapshot of a hard disk), but ultimately decided I didn't want to look into third party software if possible. (It takes me a while to read enough to convince myself that third-party software isn't going to mess up my computer and is going to be user friendly enough to use.) I'm using Windows 7 and read that the built in Backup and Restore program worked well. I didn't have to download anything or burn anything, so I decided to try that first.

To use it, you need:

• The Windows 7 Installation CD (or you'll need to create a system repair CD)
• Your original hard drive
• Your new hard drive
• And some other storage system (DVDs/External Hard Drive/Internal Hard Drive) to store the image of your original hard drive.

WARNING: The new hard drive and other storage system must be at least the size of your original hard drive. The other storage system CAN NOT be the new hard drive.

To use Windows 7's backup and restore tool:

1. Go to Start Bar -> Control Panel -> Backup and Restore -> Create a System Image
2. Choose where you want to store the image and press next
3. Choose the drive (the other storage system) you want to back up and press "Start Backup"

It took about an hour and a half to create a backup image for a 200GB system. When the backup is done, shut down your machine.

THIS IS IMPORTANT: You now need to unplug the power to your original hard drive (or otherwise remove it from your system.) Your new hard drive and other storage system must remain accessible.

Then boot from your Windows 7 Installation CD (or a system repair disk.) You'll get the Windows 7 Installation Menu. Choose your language, then choose "Restore from System Image."

The system image you just made should already be selected. Choose it and press next.

By default, the system restore program will take every hard disk on your system (except for the one holding the system image), delete it, format it, and restore the system image on it. So make sure to exclude any hard disks you don't want to be replaced on the next screen, then continue.

When I first tried this, I got an error that said no suitable disks were found. I wasted half an hour trying to figure out what was wrong. I ended up needing to cancel, select "Command Prompt" from the tools menu, and then doing the following:

1. Type "diskpart"
2. Type "select disk=disk0"
3. Type "detail disk"
4. (Read the output and make sure this disk is the new hard drive)
5. Type "clean"
6. Type "exit"

Select "Restore system from System Image" and this time there hopefully won't be an error.

Your system should restore and you should boot up into windows (you may need to go into your system BIOS to make sure your new drive is set as a boot device.) You can shut down the computer and plug your old hard disk back in if you'd like to continue using it for storage. Make sure it's not your primary boot device in BIOS! If windows doesn't show the old drive, you may need to right click "My Computer", select "Manage", select "Disk Management", and then right click your old drive and select "Online."

When I finished switching my primary drive, I brought up my Windows System Rating. Up to a 5.9 ... ... ... ... it makes me want to upgrade my machine more. Microsoft and your achievement points.... *sigh*

English Challenge

While I was in Taiwan, I would meet with Taiwanese students to exchange language. I'd help them with their English for an hour, then they would help me with their Chinese for an hour. It was a lot of fun.

Before doing it, I didn't fully realize how difficult a language English was. The grammar has so many special cases and confusing rules. Just being able to read a word doesn't necessarily help you with its pronunciation, there is a lot of memorization. Case in point, try reading this poem named Chaos: http://www.hep.wisc.edu/~jnb/charivarius.html

I still think English is easier to communicate in than Chinese. Even if you mangle the sounds up or use very messy grammar, you're still understandable... you just sound like a foreign speaker. If you mangle Chinese sounds or grammar, there's a good chance you won't be understood.

Taiwan Visa and Visa Extension

So, I went to Taiwan over the summer to study Chinese. I'm American and I was there for a little more than three months, which means I needed a Vistor Visa and that I needed to extend my Visa while I was there.

I live in California, San Diego. The nearest Taiwan embassy was in Los Angeles (which is about a 2 hour drive away) and I didn't have enough time to do my Visa through mail. The embassy is only open on weekdays, so I chose a day and drove through traffic to get up there. The office was not too easy to find. It's on the 4th floor of some huge building with a bank of the first floor. The visa application process itself was a lot smoother than I expected and the line moved pretty quickly. As long as you have your passport and proof of a reason to need a Visitor Visa, you're good to go. You do need Passport Photos, but you can take them once you're there. You can make free copies of documents there as well.

I expected them to have to mail the visa back to me, but it actually only takes a few hours to process. So I went out to lunch and picked up my Vistor Visa before I left LA. You have the option between a single visit and multiple visit visa. A multiple visit visa allows you to leave the country during your stay without voiding your visa. I got the single visit visa because it was faster to process and slightly cheaper. In the end, I wish I got a multiple visit visa so I could have taken weekend trips out.

The Visitor Visa is only valid for about two months, so if you're going to be there for longer than two months, it needs to be renewed from Taiwan. (Multiple Visit Visa will be renewed automatically if you leave the country and come back.) Renewal is free and I believe you can keep renewing it for about two years as long as you can prove a need for it. I think you can renew your Visa as early as a month after arriving in Taiwan, although I waited until the week before expiration. Renewing your Visa is free, the process is immediate and only takes 10 minutes or so once you make it to the front of the line. The attendants all speak enough English to get by if your Mandarin is really bad. The only problem I had was trying to renew my Visa at Taipei City's Office instead of Taipei County's Office; I didn't realize I was living in Taipei County. The Taipei City office is really easy to find. The Taipei County office is a bit more difficult to find, so leave yourself a lot of time if you have to go there.

If you have a multiple visit visa, renewal is much easier. Just leave the country and when you come back, it will be extended for you. One of my classmates extended his visa this way.

CLD Program Impressions

I attended the CLD Program at NTU (台大) over summer 2010 and I thought it would be useful for people considering the program if I wrote my impressions about it. I'll just write about my experiences and you can make of it what you will.

First, my background. I'm currently 27 and am studying Mandarin for purely personal reasons. I basically want basic conversational skills and good listening comprehension. Although I've previously studied French and Japanese, I'm only fluent in English. Before going to Taiwan, I self-studied Mandarin college textbooks, listened to audio tapes, and practiced conversational skills with my wife. I decided to go to Taiwan in order to strengthen my foundational skills so I could study more effectively with my wife at home. After reading about several programs from forums and other people's reviews, I decided to attend NTU (台大) over NTNU (師大), and then the CLD Program over the ICLP Program. I'm very happy with my choices.

The application process was simple. My application probably didn't get to them until the day before their "deadline", but I got in anyway. It only left me with a month to prepare for the trip, the main hassle being getting my visa. CLD doesn't offer any housing, but that wasn't a problem for me because I already had a place to stay. I had classmates that didn't take care of housing until after they arrived with very little hassle, although their rent tended to be more expensive than those that planned earlier.

The CLD is located on the NTU campus on the second floor of the language center (語言中心.) It was very easy to find, even though I'd never been to the campus before, as there are plenty of campus maps. NTU itself is very nice. The campus is beautiful and has a large library that's great for studying in. The cafeteria near the language center (in the 學生活動中心) is pretty good. There's a lot of stores, housing, and restaurants within five minute walking distance of the campus... finding things in Taipei in general is really easy. On the bottom floor of the language center is a bulletin board that makes it very easy to find language exchange partners. Finding an native speakers to practice with is very, very important if you want to really learn Chinese.

New students are required to show up at NTU a week before classes start in order to register and take a placement test. Registration went very smoothly and the staff was very nice. The optional placement test had no time limit. The first part was a written test broken into three sections. The first section was correcting grammar, the second was answering reading comprehension questions, and the third was writing an essay. The first two sections were graded immediately, after which I was sent to a different room for an oral test. A teacher looked over my results, read my essay, and then talked with me a bit in Mandarin. Afterwards, the teacher placed me. My Mandarin was very limited and although I could read many characters, I could barely write any, so I was just happy to not be placed in the lowest class. Although I didn't realize it at the time, you can buy your books from the CLD office at this point since you know your class level.

On the Friday before classes started, we had an orientation. The orientation was pretty useless, but only took an hour or two.

I bet the program quality really varies based on your teacher and classmates. I feel my teacher, 蔡美雲, was excellent. My classmates were also very good and hard working. We all refused to speak English to each other, even though we often spent time together outside of class. Their ages varied between 22 and 37, they came from all over the world. I had 5 classmates total. By looking at the class list, it seemed almost all classes had the full 6 students.

The program itself was basically working through the Practical Audio and Visual Chinese textbooks. (Although the most advanced classes moved on to different texts.) My class started at Book One Chapter 6 and ended at Book Two Chapter 8. We covered a chapter every three or four days. It seems all the classes working on the Practical Audio and Visual Chinese textbooks covered about one book in the three months.

Each day we had class for three hours. Only Mandarin was spoken. Homework takes at least half an hour if you rush through it, but it's much better if you spend more time on it. My teacher would correct whatever I wrote, no matter if it was assigned or not. After getting the introductions and review done, classes basically followed a four day loop.

- First Day -
Give an oral presentation. Usually this was reciting a memorized essay from the textbook.
Take a test over the previous material. This usually took one and a half hours.
Begin learning the vocabulary for the next chapter. The teacher would add many comments and the students were required to form sentences using the vocabulary.
Homework: Practice writing the new vocabulary words.

- Second Day -
Listening and Writing test. The teacher would say a sentence twice and the students must write the pinyin and Chinese characters for that sentence.
Finish the vocabulary and begin going over the grammar.
Homework: Write sentences using the vocabulary

- Third Day -
Listening and Writing test.
Finish going over the grammar.
Homework: Do the Workbook chapter, which is grammar and writing drills.

- Fourth Day -
Listening and Writing test.
Role Play situations, practice listening to dialogs, and work through more examples.
Homework: Write an essay.

The main benefit in all this is the teacher's guidance. In addition to the teacher pointing out gotchas, she also constantly corrected errors, whether in speaking or writing. I felt she did very well in pointing out problems I hadn't noticed by myself and explaining problems to me my wife was unable to explain clearly. I felt I learned a lot in the three months I was there. The program is what you make of it.

As a side note, to help make the most of my short time in Taiwan, I also had one on one Mandarin lessons on the side. My teacher was Peter Su and he was really excellent. His times and lessons were very flexible. These additional lessons allowed me to learn the subjects I wouldn't be able to cover during my short stay in the CLD program. I'd definitely suggest looking him up for some one on one lessons, here's his web site: http://petersonsu.blogspot.com/.

PS3 Controller on PC

(This was actually a really old post, which I dredged up so I could add a notice mentioning MotionInJoy, which I'm currently using. It has a lot of options and works perfectly on Windows 7 with no problems. It shows ads, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't install anything nefarious on your system. So... use MotionInJoy instead of whatever I talked about here. MotionInJoy avoided all the annoying driver signing this old post talked about too.)

I got a Playstation 3 controller to work with windows as a game controller, which is awesome. I'm not using it over Bluetooth, I have the controller plugged into the USB port. I've found a lot of fun indie games that I intended to play for the PC (La Mulana, Cave Story, Knytt), but wanted a controller to maximize enjoying them.

Besides the hardware, all you need is the driver and setup executable. You can get these over at http://ps3-hacks.com. It may not necessarily work very easily... I couldn't get the controller to work on my XP desktop (I'm almost positive it's due to conflicts with other drivers, but don't want to waste anymore time debugging), but it worked immediately without any problems on my Vista laptop. My suggestion would be to give up (or reinstall your entire system) if you follow the instructions and it still doesn't work. Make sure to press your PS Home button before complaining that it doesn't work.

I also have a x64 Windows 7 machine at home. By following this guide, I've been able to get the PS3 controller working. The (huge) downside is that the application uses an unsigned driver, which means you have to run Windows 7 in a special mode. The guide will explain that a little more. By the way, I do not suggest changing system properties to always allow unsigned drivers. It just doesn't seem like a good idea, plus, it puts an annoying watermark on your background.

After getting the controller to work, I had problems with actually using it to play games. Some of my games didn't give me very good joypad mapping options, mainly in not supporting all of the PS3's 16 buttons. But then I found XPadder... check out http://www.xpadder.com! (Note that versions 5.3 and below are free (softpedia link), but versions above 5.3 must be purchased. I suggest supporting the other Jonathan's efforts.) XPadder easily lets you map keyboard key(s) to any button on any gamepad supported by windows. It is REALLY awesome. I can even play Guilty Gear and pull off supers with the press of one button since it lets you map sequences.

Suddenly, fighting games (Guilty Gear), platformers (Cave Story), and RPGs (Ys) are something I'm willing to play on my PC.

Also, using PS2 Emulators with save states for my old games is pretty awesome.

Wayback Machine

So, the internet wayback machine has proven useful to me time and time again.

If you don't know, the internet wayback machine makes text backups of... pretty much the entire internet. Text only... but really, the text is generally the most devastating loss of a missing website. The site does a really good job of keeping timely backups of changes.

I've used the wayback machine to recover an old site I had made when I was in middle school. I thought I had lost all of it forever... granted what I found was very embarassing and much less amazing than I remembered, but I was very happy to find it again.

I've used the wayback machine to find pages that had been removed, sometimes with information that the webhost was hoping to get off the internet.

And I've used the wayback machine in my job, to find tutorials that had lost their home. I'd follow links to dead pages, but be able to read the information anyway thanks to the wayback machine.

The wayback machine is more than a toy and when you need it, it's definitely nice it's there.