17 August 2011 (Wednesday) - More New PC

Ungrateful as it might sound, I don’t like getting a new PC. Having one that’s been with me for a week of so is good. After a week or so I’ve had time to load up the programs I use, to add the “Flying Penguins” font (and all my trekky fonts too), and to get it how I want it. But getting it to that stage is somewhat painful. I started the process last night with the necessary evil that is Windows Update. Overnight some forty six updates came down – 112Mb of data. And (it has to be said) that the wireless network wasn’t as fast as it might have been.

Being on a late start this morning was useful - I spent some time going through the rubbish on my old hard drive. There’s a lot of stuff on there that I want – an archive of five years of blogging and eleven years of photographs immediately spring to mind. But there’s a load of rubbish on that drive as well. And so whilst I attempted to download Mozilla Firefox (HATE Internet Explorer !!!) I had a clear out of the data I’d paid good money to save.

And then I got cross. Firefox wouldn’t download. It looked like it was going to take three hours to get a 12Mb file. ‘er indoors ^TM  downloaded the file in two minutes and gave it to me on a USB stick.

Whilst that worked, it wasn’t a practical solution. Bearing in mind that networking PCs isn’t my forte, I thought I’d have a go at installing the external wireless network dongle anyway. I expected a fight, but the thing was all circuits go within five minutes. Having gone from the generic on-board network card and Internet Explorer 8 to an external Belkin 300 and Firefox has made such a difference.

With internet connection restored my next biggest insurmountable problem was email. I salvaged the mailwasher spam filter from the archived disk, and got it to work on my old freeserve accounts. However all it really did is to wash out the spam. I could read emails through it, but had no way to download emails as I don’t have Outlook or Outlook Express. Windows Live Mail came to my rescue, and I managed to bodge that so I could access my old freeserve accounts. But I then needed to tweak it so it only checks for email when I want it to, and having downloaded an email, it needs to delete it from the freeserve server. I think I’ve got that sussed, but I’m not quite sure…

And so off to work. I must admit that I was more than impressed with the service I got in PC World yesterday. And today I popped into Easy Home Brew to pick up some bits and pieces. They too were very friendly and helpful.

And then I went to Tesco’s to get lunch. I asked where the lozenges for mouth ulcers might be found. A disinterested member of their staff waved their hand dismissively and told me that they were “about four aisles away”. That was helpful (!)

Work was the same as ever, and after a dull day I came home to a rather good bit of tea. ‘er indoors ^TM boils up a rather decent bit of scran when she puts her mind to it. It was good to have a nice tea tonight. I’d been utterly unable to swap out of my late shift today, and tonight I could have gone on safari at Port Lympne, or gone to the Hythe Venetian Fete. That is I could have; if only I’d been able to swap my shift.

And then I continued with the archiving of years of accumulated data – I still have some files from fourteen years ago….