Friday, April 4, 2008

the IT girl

The Great Escapade bike ride from the Blue Mountains to Newcastle hit town this week.

http://www.bv.com.au/great-rides/40321/

Fortunately for the Ormiston Free Range crew the Mudgee rest day brought over a thousand hungry cyclists into town, and hot pork and sausage rolls were sold out within hours.

Meanwhile I have developed a snotty cold so decided to do some computer maintenance, back up and general decluttering of the hard drives. The regular laptop now a lean mean speedy machine, as I was brave enough to use some online hacks and tweaks to enhance XP performance, defragmented the drive, cleaned up the registry,and generally felt smug about regaining 7 GB of space ( there was some serious old crap on there).

Not so successful with the little portable eee pc though. With the tiny 4 GB hard drive all applications are portable versions installed on a separate SDHD card and space saving is imperative. With my newly found computer 'expertise' I fiddled with Skype and managed to induce a non stop cycle of blue screen of death/automatic reboot/blue screen of death.

In my previous life, such an event would lead to a short trip to our lovely neighbour Dick, wearing a convincing expression of helplessness and clutching a bottle of wine. This method of IT troubleshooting always resulted in a fast resolution of the problem.

The Australian method was somewhat more challenging, but I am happy to report that with the help of the eeeuser forums and a bit of good luck all systems are now go, although I have still not plucked the courage to try Skype again as yet.


** footnote**- got back to van last night after a late night Scrabble and drinking session with James and his parents (visiting from the UK) and picked up laptop bag from my bed.Bag was not fastened, laptop scudded across the floor, bits of plastic fell off. Too scared to investigate the machine this morning, fear it is now a lean mean broken machine.

No comments: