New laptop

I'm writing today's post on my brand new laptop so I guess you could call this a kind of christening for it. My reckless money spending that I vowed to put a stop on really did get the better of me when I purchased this thing though I have not come to regret buying it yet. I had a little trouble with it yesterday when setting it up, which is typical of me when it comes to computers. I don't know why but I always have headaches with them at some time or another and all I had to do to get this thing going yesterday was to turn it on and let it install itself - shouldn't be complicated at all should it? For anyone else no, but for me, most definitely.

And it's always the little things isn't it? Whenever something is wrong it's always some very small minute thing you've missed that creates the big problems - such as not making sure the driver installation disk is firmly clicked in to the optical drive. For about an hour yesterday I thought the optical drive wasn't working but it was only because I hadn't put the disk in properly. What a silly person I am! Would you believe I even called the support helpline before I realised that?

The other big headache was getting the wireless connection working. It took me about half an hour to realise that I had to turn my wireless on then about another hour to figure out what combination of keys was necessary to do that - though that hour was consumed by trying to get that disk to read in the optical drive because said disk was where the instruction manuals -with the information on how to turn the wireless on - for the laptop was kept. Having finally finished with all that yet another obstacle was placed in my path preventing me from connecting to the internet: None of us knew the password for the router in our house so I still couldn't connect to the internet. After some trouble I reset the router and created a new password, problem solved.... Or so I thought.

While I was now able to connect to the internet, two of my housemates were experiencing problems. Sophie and Geoff were able to use the new password and connect fairly easily but Paddy and Yoli were now locked out. Both Sophie and myself spent a couple of hours on Paddy's computer last night before I was finally able to figure out what was going on. From what it looked like every time we try to use windows to view available network connections it wasn't picking anything up. We realised that it wasn't that windows couldn't see the connections but that for some reason windows was not allowed to view or configure the connection. It seemed that another program on Paddy's computer was responsible for configuring his internet connection and it had used up its 90 day trial period so it was refusing to co-operate unless we bought the damn thing. We refused to play ball and uninstalled it. Windows was now back in charge.

Yoli's problem appeared more complicated - mainly because she's the only mac user in the house and the rest of us are mac illiterate - but in the end the solution was very simple. With hers we could see the connection but it just seemed the password wasn't working. After a bit of fiddling it just turned out we were typing the hex code in (whatever that means) and not the actual password I typed in when setting up the connection.

I had thought all the headaches were over but halfway through typing this blog Paddy came into my room with his laptop - it's not letting him connect again.

Fuck knows what it could be this time.