pumpkinstrokemarrow

Bit the bullet yesterday and off to John Lewis at Kingston (upon Thames) to buy a new computer to talk to the Internet, to find that John Lewis are not really into desk top machines any more. Luckily, BH knew how to skip through the Bentall's centre to PC World where they were. Rapidly buttonholed by a pleasant young man who rapidly sold us an HP Pavilion Slimline - off the display shelf as it was the last one - 20 inch wide format screen and a cheap printer. Plus a three month service agreement to get me over any teething problems. Got it all home without getting wet and without dropping anything.

Managed to copy the folders I wanted off the old computer onto an external drive OK. Installed MS Office, up to the point of authentication, OK.

Then, when I started on the Internet, the fun started. Put the Total Broadband CD (from BT) into the Pavilion to be told that the user I was logged in as did not have administrator rights, what control panel was telling me notwithstanding. OK, perhaps the PC World people had locked that user down in some cunning way as it was on display. Create a new user. Same problem. Exercised my shiny new service agreement with PC World. Phone quickly answered by a young lady who did not take more than a few seconds to explain that this was not unusual with these discs and told me the workaround. Disc now whizzes into life and asks me whether I am installing from new or whether I am adding a computer to my installation. Which question does not seem to quite cover what I want to do, viz, replace one computer with another. Try add to be told that there is some compatability problem with this version of Windows and the install stops at 53%. Just stops and hangs. No helpful messages or anything. Try from scratch and it just stops at 53% without saying anything at all.

Clearly time to talk to the helpful people from Bangalore, who for once are not helpful at all. Oh no sir, that sort of thing is not our problem. You have to talk to the supplier of your computer. But your disc is five years old; are you sure it is not out of date? Well, you can buy a new disc from a BT shop or from their website. I can't do anything from here. Thanks a bundle. Hang up to go and visit their website where I cannot find any buy new disc options. Phone another support number where the chap really is helpful. Might even live in England. No, you do not need discs any more but if you sign up for a three months support agreement I will get you up and running in no time. Getting a bit frazzled by this point, so I go for it. To find that all I had to do is plug the new computer into the existing router and I am on the Internet. No need to install anything at all. OK, so I might have been a bit dim, but I think I was missold. The really helpful chap had been told enough that all he had to do was say plug the thing in and it will work, not sell me some support.

And in case you are wondering, the reason that I did not just plug it in anyway was that my BT instructions are very firm about not plugging your computer into the router until the installation software tells you to.

Move onto setting up Norton. Now my existing Norton account is a 3 user household thing with 2 users to go. So I thought I could just spend one of the two users remaining on the Pavilion. But what I wind up with is a free 9 day trial of some fancier product. My account page tells me that the older product is not available for download. Which is a pain as Norton are plugged into my bank somehow - although a quick peek at my accounts there does not tell me how - and I do not want to wind up paying twice. But I can't find the Norton support option which produced some really helpful help a few years ago. Just a whole lot of help pages which do not help in this instance. Still, I do have interim protection. Put Norton aside for another day.

For a bit of relaxation, move onto installing the cheap printer. Manage that without serious incident. Manage to activate MS Office online without having to do hardly anything. Much easier than the phone option I have used in the past.

For a bit more relaxation, install Dropbox, having carefully put an up to date copy of my Dropbox folder where I think Dopbox will look for it. Fail completely and it creates a new one which it then proceeds to synchronise. An operation which is successfull but takes most of Tuesday night.

Despite dire warnings from some blogger or other, allow Rapport to reinstall. It never caused me any bother and HSBC clearly think that it provides useful additional protection.

Chrome, Google Earth, Nokia, Olympus and etc & etc to come. Done quite enough for now.

Instead, a bit of destruction therapy. As I have mentioned before, I don't like leaving my hard discs lying around, so I extracted the disc from the old computer. That was easy enough, a lot easier than it was on the Viao, but I still couldn't actually get inside the thing. Instead, more or less sawed it in half with a hack saw then bent it double with a club hammer. Interestingly, the actual business part of the disc appeared to be two shiny metal discs, each perhaps 1.5mm thick and mounted perhaps 5mm apart on the same spindle. Not the single platter ceramic affair the Viao had at all. However, the important thing is that I don't suppose anyone at the waste transfer station is going to be so keen on investigating my affairs that they will try and read what is left - which might well be possible if you throw enough time, toys and trouble at it. Who knows.

I close with a nice new word that I found yesterday while recovering from all this: squailer. It seems that a squailer is a stick which has been weighted at one end with wire or some such and which is used as a missile against small animals and large birds. One goes squailing with it. Just the sort of way that gangs of teenage boys would spend their time on Epsom Common a hundred years ago. This courtesy of one G. Orwell - although I don't know how he knew because he went to Eton where I imagine such an activity would have been regarded as very common.