Brummie Blogger

I don't believe it was so simple

For years my laptop has been driving me insane. It has a couple of little quirks and one of them was so bad that I was on the verge of replacing the laptop even though I can't actually afford to. It was that bad. I do a lot of typing on it. Maybe not a lot compared to some people, but enough so that when the laptop keeps going into deep sleep mode every other time I touch the keyboard, it's very annoying.

It was worse if I wanted to use the number keys at the back. It really hated me to use those. Sometimes, I didn't even have to touch them. I only needed to attempt to type and it would turn off. It's taken me five attempts to type an ISBN or my email address before now. And I can type my email address really fast now. I've had to learn to in order to beat the sleepy keyboard.

Today I had to search around for car insurance quotes. This means typing in lots of information on lots of different websites. And, it means using the number keys. I was pretty sure if I tried this on my laptop, I'd be pulling my hair out within half an hour. I could have used the desktop - Old Clunky - but as his name suggests, he's old and slow and would take so long that my insurance would probably have expired before I'd found a suitable quote.

So, I did the only sensible thing. I nicked Stephen's laptop. It's not perfect. It runs Windows 7, which I don't like. This is probably because mine runs Vista, Old Clunky runs XP, and I can't be bothered to learn yet another system. So I dislike it on principle. Also, he has no mouse and I really dislike using the swishy pad thingy. It's just so inconvenient. Pah.

It does however stay on when you're typing. Or, I thought it did. An hour into the intensive searching and it started to turn itself off whenever I typed. I wasn't impressed. It was actually worse than mine.

Something needed to be done here. I consulted Google and found out that lots of other people had exactly the same problem with their Dell laptops. Ah ha! There was one thing that we all had in common. We all wore magnetic bracelets. So this meant that...

My laptop kept turning itself off when I typed, because of my magnetic bracelet.

I feel the need to say that again.

My laptop kept turning itself off when I typed, because of my magnetic bracelet.

It was that flamin' simple. Years of frustration because the lid of the laptop has a magnetic catch. When the base of the laptop senses a magnet, it thinks the lid is closed and it goes into deep sleep. The catch is just where your right wrist sits when you touch type, and if the bracelet is loose and is further down your wrist, it doesn't catch there until you reach for the numbers.

Isn't it so obvious once you know?

The solution is to go into the control panel and alter the settings so that it does nothing when the lid is closed. It appears to be fixed now as I've typed all of this and it's been fine. Years of frustration over a bracelet.

All I need to do now then, is find out why this laptop sometimes decides it can't 'see' the router. If the problem is as glaringly obvious and simple as the other one, I should be laughing, eh?

No more runtime error

So, apparently I had a corrupted MediaDatabase.db3 file. Of course I did. No idea what one of those is, but thanks to Google (and several interesting Forum conversations that led me to the correct solution on the Adobe website), I'm up and running again.

Which means that now I have a much better photo of my little row of books.

I do love Elements :)

Too fond of books update #1

I haven't done much stitching lately due to my painful thumb making it hard to hold the needle but I have made a bit of progress on this and have a little row of books appearing.

It was touch and go whether I managed to upload a photo or not. The laptop is playing up again. Two weeks ago it refused to switch on at all and I spent two days persuading it that it would be in its best interests to cooperate. I'm not sure if it was the thinly veiled threats or my limited techy skills that saved the day, but something worked which is all that matters.

Over this weekend it developed problems with three things. First it refused to access my webmail for around 36 hours, plus it kept saying one piece of software couldn't see the internet when clearly I was connected. A system restore fixed those problems but not the third problem. Photoshop Elements is acting up. I can load the Organiser and look at my photos, but I cannot load the Editor as when I do, I get a runtime error and it closes straight down again. It is very frustrating as I have no idea how to fix it. I shall have to consult Google, methinks.

In the meantime, I had to use the photo editing thingy that came with Windows and it is dire compared to Elements. I do not like it at all. Not in the slightest. So, there's an incentive to fix Elements then.

New toys

The spreadsheet and word processor in Works are pants. Seriously pants. And all that came with my laptop was Works. On the desktop PC I have Office 2003. Yes it's old. It runs XP but it works, although very, very slowly. Which is why I usually prefer to play work on my laptop. But Works is pants. You see my dilemma?

I love organising stuff in Excel. I have all my To Be Read books in it. All the 1001 books are listed in it with lots of bells and whistles so I can arrange them how I want, and mark off which ones I have on Mt. TBR, which ones I'm in a bookring for and which ones I've read. It keeps track of how many of each there are, by number and percentage. I had great fun working out how to do all that too.

Works doesn't do any of that. You can't even use pretty colours. It's pants.

A couple of days ago I cracked. I couldn't cope any more. I'd been looking at Excel for a while but it's so expensive and I really couldn't justify it. Then I spotted that if I bought Office suite 2010, it was actually cheaper and I'd get Word and a couple of other programs too.

I've just installed it.

It looks very different to Office 2003. I think I'm going to have a lot of fun figuring out what all those tabs and whotnots do.

I'm in software heaven.

The Dark Side

I said I'd never do it but today I finally gave in to the inevitable and bought a Kindle. I had a huge wodge of Tesco vouchers so I've treated myself for my birthday.

I've said over and over again that digital books aren't 'real' books and I've turned my nose up at all the various e-readers. I tried reading on my DS and didn't particularly get on with it. No, I was convinced that nothing could replace paper. I love the smell of it, the feel of it and the look of it. I love having walls lined with bookcases. An e-reader just wasn't going to do it.

But here I am with a shiny new Kindle. I've been thinking about it for a while. I've seen a friend's Kindle, and talked to other friends about theirs. It'll be an awful lot easier going on holiday if I don't have to take fourteen books with me. I can access all those lovely free books, and there are short stories only available in digital form. It's light to hold and much easier to read than some of the chunky bricks I've been reading lately. Especially when you consider that I tend to read one-handed when I'm eating.

It had to be done. I've finally gone over to the Dark Side.

I've been playing with it all afternoon and now have quite a few books on it. All free ones apart from one. I've taken the advice of one of my friends (thanks Tree) and have bought myself a gift voucher to buy books with. Well, actually, I sent it to myself from Stephen with the message "Happy Birthday" on it. I thought he'd like to do that for me.

I had a bit of a 'mare getting it do the wireless thing as the router is locked down tight, but I got them to talk to each other in the end.

It won't replace real books, of course. It's just a supplement to my ever increasing library. But it's a fun supplement and I'm going to enjoy playing with it.

Getting to grips with Vista

It's pretty much like XP really, only shinier and that may just be the posh screen on the new laptop, I suppose. So far everything is where I thought it should be and I now have itunes all set up with most of my music library transferred over from the PC.

And boy, wasn't that fun! I'd been using a transfer cable to move stuff between the old XP laptop and the PC but the transfer cable doesn't support Vista. Of course it doesn't. Cue much rolling of eyes. After much internet research I've come to the conclusion that it really is going to be much simpler to transfer the odd bits of music etc. over using a DVD-RW. So, 4GB at a time, an assortment of music and photos have been transferred over. I'm thinking of investing in a small USB drive for moving small amounts of data inbetween the two to save faffing about with discs in the future but that's done the job for now.

I've been testing the laptop just to see what the quality of the video and sound are like, using some music videos - by The Killers, of course. It's not bad, not bad at all. It really is odd getting used to the super shiny WLED screen on it after the matt screen on the PC but videos and photos look very good indeed on it.

And, having set up links to my favourite websites on IE, I'm now blogging on it. I really must get a nice wireless mouse though. I loathe using the slidey thing.

Right, perhaps I'll just watch a couple more Killers videos, just to test this screen a bit more...

I'm not having fun

My new laptop arrived yesterday and spent the day having its battery charged. I thought it was very restrained of me not to start playing straight away, actually. I even did all my housework before turning it on today.

I wish I hadn't bothered now.

Before I can do anything with it, I need to get it talking to my wireless router. Shouldn't be difficult. I've set up Stephen's laptop - twice, and the Wii. This should only take a minute, right? Wrong. Two attempts and several hours later and it's now sitting in the cupboard where I can't see it. I do not need this much frustration after the shitty week that I've had. This was supposed to be cheering me up.

I've done the ipconfig thing on the laptop to get the number to put into the router permissions. Ok, that's not the technical terms but I know I've done that bit right - I've done it enough times - and I googled it anyway to double check. I've gone over the router settings to make sure everything is ok and it is.

The laptop has wireless turned on, it can see the router, but when I try to input the password, it goes into standby. When I eventually get it to stay on long enough to get the password input it refuses to connect and won't tell me why. It does it very fast and very prettily on its shiny new screen but it's getting very annoying.

I have no idea what I'm doing wrong. And that, I think, is what's irritating me more than anything. I've given up and I hate to give up.

Maybe I'll try again tomorrow. I think I'll go and curl up with a good book now. Books don't crash, go into standby, refuse to connect or generally misbehave. I like that about them.

Whoo - flippin' - hoo.

I just had a bit of a mishap. You know those online shopping mishaps that happen to us all? This one was a doozy, even for me. I've been selling stuff on Ebay and other places with the aim of getting enough dosh to get a new laptop.

I'd got quite a bit but the laptop I wanted was a bit out of reach. Well, actually it was quite a lot out of reach. Dell do keep having offers though so I was confident that at some point they'd have an offer I could afford on the laptop I'd set my sights on. Tonight, I got the email with that precise offer. Well, almost. It was still just a little bit out of reach.

It  had everything I wanted. Separate graphics card, decent hard drive and processor, and a fair amount of memory. No frills, but plenty of power to do the job I wanted. And, it was fifty quid more than I had in my PayPal account.

On the offchance, I checked Quidco to see if I could get any better offers through them and to my deep, deep joy found that finally the cash back on my car insurance had come through and I had 75 quid in my account. As that's linked to the same bank account as my PayPal account I reckoned it was fair game and went ahead and ordered that laptop. Whoo - flippin' - hoo!

I got me a purty new laptop!

Happy now.

Very happy.

That was exciting!

I'd forgotten just how much fun selling on Ebay could be. My four Swarovski items just finished. All sold and all did well. One item got two bids in the last thirty seconds and shot up another ten quid. Not that I was obsessively refreshing the page or anything...

I've prepared another five items to upload but these almost certainly won't do as well as I don't have the boxes for them. Three are retired items though so you never know. I've found some other bits round the house that might sell so now I've got the bug again I'll put those up over the weekend.

The most exciting thing to happen today though was the phone call from DFS. The sofas are coming tomorrow. Funny thing is, they did say it would be between six and twelve weeks for delivery. I was going to ring them tomorrow as it will be exactly twelve weeks. Looks like they're just going to make it then.

If only the TV would turn up we could move into our shiny new living room. We had a phone call last week to arrange delivery. We agreed on a day and then the next day they phoned us to arrange delivery. We were a bit puzzled and explained that we'd already spoken to someone the previous day and done just that. Apparently they had no record of it and there was no way they could deliver then anyway. We suggested today as we'd both be in all day. That seemed as if it might be a problem but they said they'd see if it was possible and phone back to confirm. We've heard nothing since. It can come any time between 8am and 8pm so there's two hours left before we'll know if it's coming today or not. We can't contact them as we don't have a contact number and the retailer only has an email address and won't pass it on to us. Great.

But, I'm still excited 'cause my Ebay items all sold *grin*

Potentially better luck

Aha! Swarovski seems to be the way to go. I listed four pieces on Ebay yesterday and they are all being watched. One, a retired piece, has eight watchers. I have high hopes for that one as there's one identical to mine currently selling with four people bidding on it and with three hours to go it's price is at £100. With a bit of luck the people who don't win it will bid on mine. So, I don't have any bids yet, but I'm optimistic.

The pieces that I've listed all have the original boxes and if they do well I'll try the remaining ones that don't have the original boxes. I'm just concerned about packaging them up safely enough. I need to find some sturdy boxes for them methinks.

And finally, the last layout to be uploaded from the Vegas album. I can start to bore you all with Disney ones now...

I needed just one last single layout to finish off the Vegas album. As I'd had a choice of photos to use from the Skywalk, I decided to use one of those, if only to remind me that my husband is completely and utterly stark staring bonkers. That's glass he's sitting on, you know. Nothing underneath it for hundreds of feet. It makes me queasy just thinking about it and there he is sitting there all relaxed as if he's sitting on the floor at home watching tv. Gah!

Costco papers, prima flowers, assorted brads and photo turns and a bit of ric-rac.