Jon Kimura Parker - Fantasy

This CD arrived today.  It has my favorite solo piano work on it - Schumann's Opus 17 Fantasie.  I shall add this recording to to put along side Curzon, Anda, Pollini, Perahia and Tryon as versions to set aside as my favorites. It is beautifully recorded.  There is not a hint of percussiveness at all! Jon Kimura Parker won the 1984 Leeds Competition - the only Canadian to have ever done so.  As a high school student, I remember seeing a clip on CBC news of the end of the Beethoven 4th piano concerto which he played in his winning effort.  Parker is on the Faculty of Rice University.  Lin Cho-liang happens to be on the faculty there too.  Must be a great music school to go to!  Now, Colin Zelt, who helped me out in grad school is also at Rice University.

HP Pavilion 500 Reformatting

When I tried to reinstall Windows 8 on an HP Pavilion 500 Desktop with the restore DVDs I created with the Cyberlink software that came with the PC, it would give me a read error on DVD 4.  I managed to restore the computer to Windows 8 from the restore partition, but it would not update to Windows 8.1.

I tried again tonight, but the problems started.  The UEFI BIOS wouldn't let me change the boot order even after I disabled secure login (I couldn't access the legacy boot items like DVD-ROM, Primary HD etc).  I also got an error message when I tried to restore the computer to factory new condition from the restore partition of the hard drive (that worked previously, but not tonight). So, I plugged in a Lenovo slim DVD burner and booted from USB Optical Drive option in the BIOS.  This worked!  The Lenovo could read the 4th DVD and the HP Pavilion was restored to factory original condition.

I really dislike how HP only lets you make one copy of the restore disks.  I made ISO images of the DVDs with ImgBurn to make sure I could burn restore DVDs for this computer in the future in case the original copies got lost or corrupted.