poltr1 | A week in the life of a computer geek......

1. A few weeks ago,

athenawindsong asked me to copy all the files from her 7-year old Gateway 300S to an external hard drive. In return for this service, she said I could keep the computer. (Thank you

athenawindsong for the hardware!)

Last week, I started setting the machine up for my daughter so that she may use it to play her computer games. I tried to install Windows XP Service Pack 3 on the machine, which already had XP Service Pack 1, Norton Internet Security, and AOL's client software. After about 30 minutes, I got an "access is denied" error message, and the service pack rolled back itself. The same thing happened with Service Pack 2. This happened even after uninstalling Norton and as much off the AOL software that I could. So I had the idea of trying to upgrade using my XP system disk w/SP2. It didn't work. I would get a pop-up after booting, saying "Windows is now restarting....", in an infinite loop. I then tried to do a full install, but the machine's video card wouldn't go out of 640 x 480 mode. So I got fed up and installed Ubuntu Linux. Problem is, my daughter's games all run under Windows, and Linux is finicky about modems. This weekend, I plan to install scanModem (from a CD-R) and wine, and then do an install of the games under wine. If that doesn't work, I'll purchase an OEM copy of XP Home.

2. Sometime last year, I bought a wireless router, with the eventual hope of using it as the basis of a home network, once I had Zoomtown DSL service from Cincinnati Bell. But they still aren't providing that service to the street my condo is on. And I wasn't about to give Time Warner any more money for their RoadRunner service.

I finally started using it at the apartment last week. But I left the setup disk back at the condo. After running it, I realized the program on it was simply a more user-friendly front-end for the menus that I could access from the router directly via the router's IP address. At one point, the router and the DSL modem weren't talking to each other. I was able to kit the Linksys knowledge base at work, and learned about a trick I needed to do: change the router's IP address for DSL usage. After two days of going home to work on it during lunch, I finally got it working.

3. A man at my church asked me if I could fix a Gateway laptop for him. He said the power connector needed to be re-soldered. This is still pending, as I don't have a table to work on, unless I take it to work and work on it in the "base camp" area, where there's a table I can use.

You know you're a computer geek when the first thing you want to spend money on is computer equipment.