Saturday, October 14, 2006

a better morning

Took the computer back up to Karen's office, and completed the networking stuff. When that guy turned back on, XP came up, and, without any tweaking whatsoever, Internet Explorer found the DSL modem, it was a major relief.

All that remained was to reconnect to Karen's computer and printer, for sharing of those resources. I had to tweak the Zone Alarm settings to make the connections (the IP address had changed, for some reason), but all was well.

So, the task 'resize partitions' ended up taking 9 hours. My questions are:

1) Are the 'Mac vs. PC' commercials correct?
2) Could using a more sophisticated (i.e. not free) utility have made it simpler?
3) Does my ignorance about disk partitioning reflect poorly on my political judgements?

The best part of the whole story was that Karen called me last night just at the point where my panic and frustration were maxing out. Never fails.

She returns in 5 hours.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ah yes ...nothing better than when Shirley asks me how much longer some computer task will take me. That pretty much jinxes it immediately.

Congrats on sticking with it and getting things up and running. And this has no bearing on your political judgements. It merely points out that more than just the political realm is screwed up. Computers should just work. Of course, I'm glad that some of it seems like black magic, 'cause it helps keep guys like us employed with decent-paying gigs.

But if you have to go through that much pain to bring a machine up ...or if it takes some SERIOUS investigating to be able to follow the money trail of Abramoff / Reed / Rove et al .....then it's a sign that something is wrong.