…after some very fretful days without a working computer. I won’t bore you with the details here, but I appear to have another sickly motherboard. This time it may be rescuable, but in the meantime I’ve work to get on with, so I’ve plugged my hard drive into B’s machine again.
It’s a brand new drive, so I’m having fun (NOT) reloading all the software, drivers and data. It’s going to take me days; on the other hand, it’s nice having a clean fast drive that isn’t loaded with three years’ worth of rubbish.
I tried a Linux Ubuntu boot disc – one that works from the CD drive. I couldn’t get the network going, but it impressed me enough to want to try it further. I had planned to get a drive big enough to dual-boot, so that I could run both Linux and Windows. Unfortunately, when I went shopping, I found I could only afford a 40G drive – not really big enough to partition. But I’ll do it eventually.

Being electronically cut off from the world was strange. I’m physically isolated here – unable to drive, 15 miles from the nearest town, 30 miles from the nearest train station. I missed being cut off from my email and forums and lists; I had nobody to talk to! Well, apart from B and Son, of course. But B is currently immersed in the World Cup (which I can take or leave). And when he’s not watching football, he’s rebuilding the bathroom. And he’s totally uninterested on anything on the Net anyway. I found myself doing a lot of restless thumb-twiddling – I kept wanting to tap at a keyboard.
Son is currently rebuilding his computer, using my old computer bits and with the help of my PC repari manual. He’s managed to get it going this morning. So it looks like I’ll have to buy him that wireless network stick I’ve been promising him.

Oh well, got to load some more software….