Computers — can’t live with them, can’t live without them

I’ve been plagued by PC problems lately. First my day job Fujitsu notebook’s Windows crashed. I have been using this fella for 3 years so I guess sooner or later, (I didn’t expect so soon!), he’ll give up for good.

So I had to rely on my 6-year old Compaq desktop, which has served me quite well… until now. It’s soooooooo slow! When I used Yahoo Messenger, my typing seems to be faster than the onboard Pentium III. But then one day, it just wouldn’t boot. I swore, cursed and spat at it, but it still wouldn’t boot.

Few days later, a PC-friendly guy (read: nerd) came over and… the Compaq came alive! Not the past few days but on this day! Damn it! Still had to pay him for coming over though. So he installed some RAM as he believed this will speed things up.

I’m not sure it did, but I’m sure I got poorer. Later, the Compaq seems to be *almost* able to catch up with my typing. I didn’t know I’m a speed king until now.

Then a customer was telling me how much fun and how much more productive he is with his Mac and this got me thinking… Yeah, why not get a Mac?

So make way for the Mighty Mini!

Mac Mini, that is. Cute little fella. See how small it is…

Since I was now on a spending spree, got myself a 19″ Dell LCD as well. This slim beauty (dang! it isn’t white!) accepts 2 inputs, analog and DVI so I had my Compaq hooked up to the analog and the Mac to the DVI. This way I could still use both machines on the same screen! (I’m rarely this pleased with myself, so please applaud.)

Thank you, thank you.

Boy, oh boy. What folks say about Mac is true. It’s so easy to use! I had the whole gizmo (looks more like a gizmo than a machine) set up and hooked to the Net in less than half an hour! The applications are quite fun too. See the tiny remote below. You could watch movies, listen to music, browse through your photo album with just this little fella. Told you it’s a Mighty Mini.

Just when I thought I was having too much fun, it’s true, I was having too much fun. Suddenly www.diyparadise.com went down. Yeah, read my other post.

Damn!

Then I got the site up again but had to edit some pages. This is when I realized in the quest to make the Mac so easy to use, perhaps some folks like me, who know a little but not too much, would like more control of our machine. I realized there’s no simple text editor in my Mac! Oh on!

As I edit my webpages entirely in HTML, this was really bad. Another nightmare I thought.

Fortunately, the WWW came to the rescue. Downloaded TextWrangler, a shareware meant for Macs, and what a wonderful text editor this is! Absolutely the best I ever used. It recognizes HTML and color codes them so that you know which is HTML coding and which is your text. Isn’t this nice? Plus the 19″ just makes my job soooo unlike a job.

Just when I thought I’m cruising now, another problem appeared! Now is the turn of my local ISP. The line just went dead. Phone calls are okay but I can’t get my broadband anymore.

Many many calls, curses, swears and spits later, the ISP guys found some cable connection at one of the exchange boxes (I guess that’s what it’s called) were faulty, thus causing intermittent, then permanent failure.

At time of writing, everything seems fine now. But I’m not too hopeful. Keeping my fingers crossed. Sure hope I already ran my share of bad luck…

10 August 2006 | Computer stuffs | Comments