Upgrading My Computer Capability
Chapter 4 Thursday 2/21/08

Today the theme of upgrading my computer capability relates to the saying "you can’t teach an old dog new tricks". Although it may not be true in total, it certainly is on the right track.
I fired up the new dell and started getting familiar with Vista. Loaded the MS Office for students software. Over all - wow!

I started transferring stuff using my 128meg flash drive. Right away I realized that 128meg was not near big enough. It was going to take a lot of mechanical moving to get it transferred. I did get my Rails to Trails Grant Implementation stuff transferred. Which includes the Construction Plan which I am working on.

I brought the CPlan up on MSWord 2007. Wow! Really fancy over MSWord 2000. What a difference 7 years makes with those guys at MSoft. You can tell that they have been working away these last 7 years.

I spotted a 1Gig Flash Drive in Alco for 15 bucks, so bought it. There was risk as the writing said W98SE (and up). I don’t have SE. I have run into this problem before and was able to work around it with an online download. The 1GB drive worked good in the Dell but the HP would not recognize it. After a couple phone calls and email to Coby Electronics I obtained a driver that should work. But after fiddling around for several try's I was unsuccessful. I called back, explained everything and was told I was ‘out of luck’, they had no other drivers.

I connected the Dell to my KCOnline ISP. Seems to be working OK. I am not doing email yet though, until I get a virus checker. Will probably wait until I get DSL as these downloads are quite large. I am planning on a FREE one.

Ah DSL. Yes I have finally broken down, bit the bullet and signed up for DSL with my ISP. $12 more a month, no activation fee, no contract, no modem cost, no add on’s. No change in my local phone bill. Only upfront cost was shipping the package, $8. The package includes the DSL box, 4 filters, a couple cables, and the instructions. In a week or so I should be high speed (768K down, 128K up). That should get me started on high speed.

I ran into some kind of a problem with the HP yesterday. The day before when trying to get my FD’s running something happened that locked the HP up. During the turn on after a lock up shut down (termed ‘bad shut down’), the scan disc program seemed to be running on the D drive. And it wouldn’t run there. I had not noticed it trying to run on D drive after bad shutdown, before. Windows would not come up. I could not figure out a way to circumvent the Scan Disc program. I was getting nervous. Finally after reading my BIG Win 98 book that I bought at a sale many years ago. There was a method to do just that- <<programs/accessories/system information/tools/system configuration utility/Advanced/Advanced trouble shooting settings - - - check the box that says --- Disable Scan Disc after bad shut down.>>.... I also did a HD (C drive) clean up, scan disc and defrag. After which it seems to be working just fine. Needless to say I was nearing the panic state yesterday morning, about ready to visit the local computer guy. I have lots of history on the HD computer, 10 years worth.

I moved the USB cable from to my HP 845c printer from the HP over to the Dell. The software was ‘in the Vista box’ so it installed pretty clean (after a couple of pilot errors). I printed out a page from my MS2007 word Construction Plan and it worked good. To keep from having to move the printer cable back and forth I will try to hook brother Johns discarded Epson printer to the HP, . . . . sometime.

I am still trying to figure out the best way to transfer data from the HP (it does not have an ether net card, but I may be able to take one out of brother John/s discarded ‘e machines’ computer). I can tell it will take a lot of work using my little 128MB Flash Drive. Maybe I should just buy a ‘backup’ Hard drive and move the whole HP (maybe 8 Gig or so of info) to that. Will just have to make sure it will connect to my Win98 system.

Maybe 1 more chapter after this, about hooking up to DSL and getting my data transferred. Time will tell.