Gosh, it’s gone by so quickly, mostly through my own silliness.
Yesterday was going to be a crappy day, with rain and wind. But, our friend M wanted to go to the Thai Food Festival at Greenwich Park, so we duly got on a 188 bus. Getting there was OK, but once we got there the skies opened. There was a lot of good food there, although the coconut milk wasn’t very good (M said that the coconut wasn’t fresh): I loved the Thai Green Curry and the mango with sticky rice. But the wind and the rain were so pervasive that the few people who were there along with us simply crowded under trees and ate disconsolately. It must have been a terrible disappointment to the organisers. I was disappointed too, as I like Thai food and we weren’t going to get much.
We got on a 188 bus to go back to the Elephant, but what a mistake THAT was…the roadworks were all on that side of the street and it took us more than an hour to get back home, where it would normally take 20-25 minutes. I got off at home, and HWMBO continued on with M to central London, where he did a bit of shopping. We should have taken the Docklands Light Railway instead, or the 188 going the other way and changed at North Greenwich.
On the other hand, I decided that, for various reasons, I should install Vista on my computer, now that I’ve had it for more than a year and SP1 is out and running. I first discovered that the 64-bit version won’t upgrade; you have to install it on a new machine and lose all your settings. I declined and installed the 32-bit version.
It took quite a while, and I didn’t leave the computer until around midnight (from 7 pm).
The computer work continued today, after church. Some of the difficulties include:
— The desktop icons are too large, and I couldn’t get the screen to accept all of them at one time. I’ve had to put some folders on the desktop and use them to contain icons of similar use, such as “Website” and “System utilities”. I now can see them all on the desktop.
— Everything was so slooooow. I turned off the Aero and went back to Windows Classic, and that seemed to help no end.
— I kept getting messages from the MDM, a debugger. They have now stopped. I don’t know whether that’s because I’ve fixed it, or because the machine is tired of showing them to me and will start again when it gets a second wind. I haven’t tried a Google search yet. Too spaced out.
— My Creative Sound Blaster Audigy didn’t work (known driver problem). I had to download the drivers and spend about 3/4 hour jollying them along until they worked. Now they’re fine.
— My HP printers didn’t work at all. I had to reinstall the HP Photosmart 3210 software before that worked; I had some difficulty with the Bluetooth-connected HP Laserjet 4P as HP doesn’t keep drivers for it around any longer, and the item that appears in the Device Manager is the Bluetooth adapter, not the printer. I managed to fool it into thinking that the 4P was directly connected and got that working.
The next step is to repartition the disk and get all my data onto one partition, and all the programs into another. Then I should go through, uninstall the programs I don’t want, and then take a backup of each partition. Oh, and I need to get rid of Ghost, it really sux.
I have heard that the Olympics are going on now, but haven’t had a chance to see any cute swimmers or gymnasts.
Upgrading to Microsoft Windows Vista sounds like a big headache.
You said it, kiddo. It’s like having a splitting headache and discovering suddenly that you’ve been hitting your own head with a hammer for the past two days.
Um, yeah, and it isn’t over yet. I’m still learning about Vista, and figuring out what to do and where to go to get something done is a real pain in the ass.
I think I would have been better off not bothering, but now it’s too late…oh, well, I seem to be able to do everything I need to do. That’s the most important thing.