Discontinued Google Pinyin IME

Been using Google Pinyin IME in Windows for years. Love it or so use to its functionality (can type both simplified & traditional Chinese characters), compatibility (so far no system halt issue) and customisability (use your own established phases).

Thought it will be uneventful to install and set up Google Pinyin IME in my new Windows 7 x64 SP1, only to find out the same nagging "network error" message keep popping up whenever I try to logging with my Google account to retrieve my own established phrases data.

It seems Google has shut down or change the particular host for Pinyin IME synchronisation, as stated in Google Pinyin wiki under "synchronization failure". The official forum has been taken down, left the Chinese group staying stagnant.

Despite being unable to synchronise, the 64-bit version of the installation file is still available here (15.6MB). Well how I know? Guess it is provided even since the very beginning but the page has also been taken off.

New Year New System, Yet Another Success of Core2Duo E8400 in SR5222d

After I had been using Windows XP Pro x64 SP2 for more than a decade, I decided to sell my ten-year-old Compaq (does any new netizen never heard of this?) Presario together with the old OS. It took me a few weeks before "taming" down yet another Compaq Presario that was used by my brother. Speaking of this "taming down" process is clueless. In fact I thought it was either power supply unit, main board, CPU, even RAM to be blamed that causing the new system not being able to show POST screen after boot.

Note that I'm trying to fix an Intel Core2Duo E8400 into the old MSI main board in this SR5222d, which according to the official website is only support up to E7xxx. Even there are numbers of successful trials claimed by netizens.

The only medicine is, time. So I just got myself distracted by other things, and it just come back, getting steadier each boot.