James tried to keep me busy yesterday and one of the places we went to was Fry's; they had a sale on the type of RAM both he and I use, so he bought one for each of us. I also found a Scrabble game and another disk of various arcade-type games.

He found a WWII sim game that required Windows2000, at least, so today before we went to a birthday party he loaded Win2000 on his computer (we're both still running Win98, having not really needed anything more advanced with the things we do; hey, I can get online, read e-mail, do web pages, use WordPerfect and Paradox and all my different graphics programs—who needs that honkin' disk-hogging WindowsXP with its 3-D graphics (b-b-b-big deal, to quote Porky Pig).

Well, he's been wrestling with the wretched thing all day. He had to re-install things like his video card and his sound card, which was complicated by the fact we couldn't find the driver CDs for them (when he upgraded his computer his motherboard and Win98 just picked up the slack and he didn't need them; ironically the eternally finicky network card worked just fine). We had cleaned out his CD-ROM collection before, but we did it again. Now everything is not only in its place, but we have a nice pile of games that looked good but didn't strike his fancy for the donation box.

Incidentally, we never did find the audio and video card CDs; James found them a little while ago in a box of computer parts he still had downstairs.

It doesn't matter; we managed to download the video driver from Invidia's site (I always think of season two of Star Blazers every time I hear their name...) and Win2000 still doesn't want to load the sound drivers. He keeps getting the infamous "blue screen of death" when he tries to use the driver CD. However, there were actually answers to the problem on Microslop's site! He found out he needed Service Pack #4 to solve the problem. He's downloaded it, installed it...

...and it still doesn't work.

At least we're not as bad off as a friend who downloaded with confidence the latest Microslop upgrade for WinXP.

It erased everything on her hard disk.

Nice job, Bill...

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 9:34:00 PM

Comments:

Glad to hear you kept busy this weekend. On a lighter note, though, maybe you and James should switch to Mac?? Windows is for the birds....

-- Robert (a loyal reader)

# posted by  Anonymous : 11:07:00 PM

 

Win2K wasn't a bright spot. It's better than WinME, but that's not really saying all that much! XP was the evolutionary leap. You might want to try upgrading one of your systems to that. I know there's a show coming up at the Civic Center - you ought to be able to get a full copy of XP cheap. (Or go on-line - I've seen full XP Pro for about $80 or so.)

# posted by  Anonymous : 10:46:00 PM

 

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