Caramba, that was a weekend. Or, rather, it wasn’t, if a weekend is defined as “time off”. There are a certain number of things which need to be accomplished this week, and I’m trying to spread them out so as to not get overwhelmed. Ha! I almost said that with a straight face.
My wife is in Florida at an education conference this week, and took her shiny new netbook with her. This, of course, was causing my pre-teen son to wither and die, as he was consuming gaming videos 18 hours a day on the damned thing and would now be forced to… oh no, do something. (again, ha! Like I’m any different)
SO I’ve been attempting to resuscitate my old Gateway M675 laptop, which is hard to do on a limited budget. I had figured out, long ago when it went to techno heaven, that it was the hard drive that was the main culprit, with a boot sector that was defying all attempts to repair. The model is now old enough that I can get a replacement on eBay fairly cheap, but then comes the next hurdle: where the heck did I put that driver disc?
That question is still not resolved, incidentally. Gateway’s support pages provided most of what I needed, and another week was spent trying to get those to work in harmony. Kept getting the dreaded blue screens with a different stop code every time, started over, same thing happened, pulled one of the RAM chips – sorry kid, you’ll have to get by on a mere 512 megs – and everything works. At least for a netbook substitute.
So now he’s wondering why he can’t play Half-Life on it (heavy pre-teen sigh).
Well, while wrestling with the damned thing yesterday I watched (deep breath) Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (long title) with him, because he’s a big fan of the books. I was entertained. Some of the CGI didn’t hold up too well; that may be one of the reasons, besides money, that I’m in nooooo hurry to upgrade to Blu-Ray; watching Spider-Man 3 on a monitor at Fry’s Electronics I found myself looking at each scene and cataloging the various CGI elements therein.
Back to the library this afternoon to turn in the Simon/Kirby Sandman collection, among others, and pick up more Osamu Tezuka manga. Then trying to get the laptop to play Half-Life without screwing up what I’ve accomplished to this point. Pray for me.
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