Well our broadband seems to be performing admirably from the Post Office, our router has remained up and stable for a couple of weeks now which is more than can be said of BT's broadband....which had a tendency to behave like flashing Christmas tree lights ...On..... Off.... On... etc.....I am fully aware that the Post Office use BT wholesale as their supplier so technically we are still with BT only paying considerably less for the privilege....
The weather today is particularly typical of a British Summer Time here in Wales... wet.. and when it's not wet it's moist or drizzle ... we've had a few days of sunshine though so not all bad....
I've just finished re-installing a Sony VGN-CR31S laptop .... it's a bit of a beast, with 2MB Ram and a Dual core Intel CPU with 160GB of storage thrown in... it flies... but it hasn't been a smooth transition from Windows Vista to Windows XP... it originally came installed with Windows Vista Home and with me being utterly against anything Vista on any computer I decided to reformat it and install Windows XP...
You can imagine my horror when I browsed to the Sony website and found that Sony don't supply Windows XP drivers for this laptop it was purely designed for Windows Vista .... so the only way I could make it work under Windows XP was to track down the Vendor ID and Device ID in System/Details then make note of their PCI device numbers then go to the PCI device database bash all the hex numbers in and see who made it then dig around their websites for some generic driver that loads under XP....
Luckily I got everything working perfectly including the Sony Motion Eye webcam built into the lid of the laptop, the only thing I couldn't get to work was the Soft Modem made by Conexant Systems.... but who uses modems these days ???
There is a huge difference between running Vista on this laptop and XP .... XP simply flies on it, whereas bloatware Vista crawled along... I did initially load Ubuntu 10.04 on it and everything was identified and loaded automatically even the motion eye webcam made by Ricoh.... but the laptop isn't mine otherwise it would be running Linux .... No I'm reinstalling it for a friend and he insisted on Windows XP which is what he has installed on his other laptop.... So he got it :) .... although he doesn't know how much work it took to get it usable !!!! ... and yes it's a pink laptop.... he got it back from his ex girlfriend... my advice is if you're ever going to buy your girlfriend a laptop at least make sure it's one in bloke colours.....
Nothing much else to report here at Chez Brabrook, life is a bit slow these days ....
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