[the move]

October 14, 2002

It's been about three weeks now since the fateful day that my ancient little P2/400 Windows98 laptop decided to go into death throws. Time to start jotting down some notes so I don't forget where I found things once I get up and running and don't think about them for awhile. Heck, I know I have already forgotten a ton.

How it started:

After several hours of cussing and fiddling that morning, I pronounced the old guy beyond my ability to save. I am a bit, errrr, hardware challenged and when pieces and parts are required I defer to the experts at Computer Renaissance which, luckily, is just a few miles down the road. I do plan to take it in for a visit to see if it can be revived as a backup, checker for slow processors and travel companion but as we were in the middle of the term at LVS, I did not have time to be bothered and, as I thought, despite fairly current backups there would be things that I wanted to retrieve that had not occurred to me when saving assorted goodies. It can still be accessed in an extremely limping manner. So it stayed here when I headed screaming to the store.

After pulling up wild eyed in front of the store, a salesman had me calmed in blink. He answered my howl of "What do you have in stock noooowwwww???" with some interesting possibilities. In less than 30 minutes a new *toy* with a 120G hard drive was loaded into my car [flashers going in the emergency/fire lane] and off I went promising to call if I had a problem and to return when time allowed to add a nice extra chunk of ram. It will work at 256ddr for the moment, but that's not nearly enough for the kind of things I want to add/run.

But hey, it was what was in the loaded system in stock that I wanted, an easy upgrade. I was in a hurry. There had been a stack of coding assignments sitting there earlier in the day to review and I knew the list had to be growing.

All went well with the setup except for the momentary irritation when I could not find the plug for the electrical adaptor cord on the monitor. Cool flat screen, but dang did they hide that little dot of a spot well. A howl to the store prefaced by "laugh later, but tell me now" had me up and running.

The next trick was to get reconnected to Earthlink. I haven't heard a good report yet on the limited choices of broadband available in this area [nightmare comments of outages for days to a week at a time] so *we* of the cathouse will stick with good old Earthlink dialup for now. The first problem was to find the TCP/IP settings dialog box. *IT* seemed determined to send me to a connection wizard and not allow me to enter my info manually. Dialog box was not where I thought it should be. Looked all around, couldn't find it. [grumble, grumble] Okay, there's always the software, I can use the silly stuff for now, dispose of it later...wrong! Seems the 800 number to connect to their server and get hooked in was eternally busy. Sheesh! I don't have that problem at all with their regular connection....have never received a busy signal in fact.

Was getting a bit hyperventilated and "upside down." [Tony say all the boxes and wires spread across all parts of downstairs, so he wisely retreated up to the bedroom and hide with his guitar as an ally to drown out my grumbles.] I finally took a deep breath and decided that it might be a good idea to put dinner on the table. It did occur to me suddenly that I had not thought about food at all that day. haha Might be a good idea, huh? Dinner was served and rapidly consumed. Then it was back to the hidden upper reaches for Tony and back to the 'puter chair for me.

After a break and with a full belly, it was easy for me to find that TCP/IP settings box I was looking for. Just about a click deeper than it was in Win98. Everything seems to be as this OS is set for multiple users. Also did not help that my particular system came set up for a broadband connection only. No dialup connection had been enabled.

There is more detail in the tips & resources sections. But basically, it is here: Start -> Control Panel ->Network Connections-> Go ahead and let the wizard start. About three clicks in it will offer you the option to set up manually. Pick that, enter all required information. Once you have the connection set it will appear in the network connection listing. If you need to make changes to your settings, you can do so by selecting & right clicking the connection name, then select properties and the same dialog box you are used to from Win98 will appear.

Note: If you are using your ISP's software or it is already loaded on to your computer, it is probably easiest just to let the wizard do *his* job. If you do decide to create the connection manually, make sure you have information such as your desired connection phone number, dns numbers, and tcp/ip settings written down and close at hand.

Okay, enough on this part of the moaning. I was online in moments after I found the correct spot and happy again. Until I saw how far behind I was on messages and postings. lol.