This is only a pretend post

My most frequently used key.

I know a lot of this was in my previous post and that it’s all pretty boring anyway but I had an offer of help from a blog buddy “Connie” and as I wrote to her about my experiences I was reminded of similar incidents in the past that became funny with the passage of

time, besides it will give all the clever IT people and the smug Apple Mac users something to chuckle about.

Now that's what you call a computer crash.

My lengthy email to Connie;

Hi Connie, thanks for your comments on my new laptop, it’s a Satellite Pro M200 different to most companies the Pro model from Toshiba comes with less features than the normal Satellite, no web-cam, fingerprint sensor, just the Pro style working gear (which was what I wanted).

It has a 14 inch widescreen display, 2GB of Ram, it has a 32 Bit dual core OS, it came with only an 80GB hard drive (ONLY!! My first computer only 5or 6 years ago came with 1GB) and has a VISTA Business installed, you now know more about it than I do because you probably understand most of that.

Just to complicate my life a little more I also bought and installed Windows Office Student and Home Edition, which can be installed on up to 3 computers, this also is pretty different to my old Office 2005 so I’m learning all the time with it too, I’m not sure whether its just that I’m dumb, but it took me at least 10 minutes to find the Select All feature!!! (This is starting to sound like one of my posts Hmmm??).

OK, the problems that I know about to date;

I have 3 flash drives that work fine on XP but will not work on VISTA, they are a 256MB EasyDisk, a 512 MB Rundisk, and a 1GB Sony, I have visited all the manufacturers web sites in search of up to date drivers without success, so yesterday with a burst of brilliance I bought yet another Sony 1GB drive which was clearly marked VISTA compatible, joy of joys it worked, so I copied all the driver files from it to the old Sony.... and it bloody well won’t work!!!!

Enough with the flash drives.... at least I got my Maxtor 250GB external hard drive to work although it took updates from both Maxtor and Windows to get there, no such luck with my Canon pixma ip3000 printer after hours of re-loading and downloading from Canon and Windows it loaded.... well it said it did anyway but I can’t print with it!!!!

I think I may have mentioned the joy of Loading some 13,000 photos on to Windows Photo Gallery file by file as I tagged them (whatever that means) I read with some alarm your comment about not being able to install Nero which is a program I use a lot, so I haven’t even tried it yet.

I do so look forward to the day that you alluded to when VISTA becomes easier to use than XP, I am inclined to believe that security has been tightened up a lot, not that I ever had very much trouble but to date none of my security programs have found any problems.

I had anticipated problems with my Quicken Personal Plus program and my genealogy program Personal Ancestral File but both worked with a minimum of fuss ( a couple of strange differences with Quicken but nothing I can’t get around, on yet another lighter note I looked for the defragmenter for a looong time before I found it and when I finally found it I found that it worked behind closed doors so there is no indication of what stage it’s at... frustrating rather than a problem, I had 6,000 photos and files in the rubbish bin at one stage so I knew the files were gonna be everywhere... and they were, it took about 5 hours for a week old hard drive to be defragmented.

We haven’t touched on my favourite subject yet.... the internet... I got my wireless broadband connected without much trouble (ie about half a day) but to date still have had no joy getting my Computers networked, as well as all the above I have downloaded heaps of stuff and got it installed and working so there is a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, I just pray it’s not the tilt train zooming toward me at 150 KPH.

As to your last line about offering help, short of being able to sit at my desk and physically do some of the things that elude me, I thank you for the offer but I’m guessing that from a distance there isn’t much anyone but me can do.

I do feel better having got all, or most of it, out of my system though.

Kind regards, Peter.