This evening I thought I’d have a relaxed evening, get some stuff done, maybe have an early night, for a change. But so far all I’ve managed to do is have dinner and spend £500. And dinner required me to cook the chips twice because, due to more than one thing, managed to make one side of them completely black. And I mean completely.

And after, my computer decided that I didn’t really need to see the screen any more… After spending some time in Safe Mode, we established the graphics card is going. At the moment I have lots of coloured lines on the screen and I am copying my files from that computer to my little laptop.

I have a new one on order now, which will have Vista, unfortunately. I still can’t find anything in XP because they changed the file system from 98, so I’m just going to be even more lost. And the resolution isn’t going to be as big as on my old one.

So now I get to play on the little laptop (so glad I have two, although I can also use my work laptop), see if I can get my friend to get my stuff off my hard drive. And see if I can get a long weekend off in a couple of weeks to go home and install everything. And get all the stuff off my last backup (which, as it wasn’t the instant before the screen went, isn’t recent enough).

So my computer might have been slow and full of junk that I’ve been meaning to delete for years, but I liked it.

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Originally uploaded by paranoidangel

This is what I’ve spent most of my past week on (apart from looking at houses): the little blue laptop. I’ve photographed it on top of my current one to show the size difference. My computer is 15.4″, the laptop is 8.9″ (I know they’re both laptops but I have to call them both something different). It has Linux on it (Linpus, to be precise) so I’ve spent a lot of time on the forums trying to work out how to do stuff. It’s a lot like Unix, so some of it is coming back to me.

Biggest pain in the arse so far is my TV. When I plug my computer into it I set it to PC and it shows me a picture. That doesn’t work with the laptop, but it turns out what you’re supposed to do, is cycle through the options that let you watch two channels at once until you get to PC. At which point it’ll show you the picture at 640×480, no matter which computer you plug into it. Which is not helpful, since it only shows you a corner of the screen. Useful.

This evening I’ve enjoyed watching the diving and swimming. Now there’s some horses running and jumping. I don’t know how they get the horses to do that – in my experience horses generally do exactly what they want. It is quite amusing that when they fall off the horses carry on.

It’s annoying that all the tennis has been on during the day when I’m at work. Although it is something that’s harder to show highlights of, as opposed to swimming, where a race might only last a minute. And the fencing highlights really are highlights, ie bits of fights. With the results listed on the right of the video. So I’ll live without seeing the stuff in the week, and concentrate on watching the fencing this weekend.

Tonight I bought myself a new laptop! It’s the Acer Aspire One, which they promised would be available in red, but it turns out my choices are white and blue. So I picked blue. Although it isn’t out till next Monday because I wanted one with 1Gb RAM (rather than 512Mb) with Linux. I ordered myself a wireless keyboard with a touchpad, so I can plug the baby laptop (it weighs just over 1kg) into the 26inch TV and type on a laptop-size keyboard, while sitting on the sofa.