Irene's Weblog

So, I finally managed to get moved over to our new computer. It only took a year to do so, but, in my defense, I had to save to purchase the memory and then I actually needed the time to set it up. I also had to wait for Paul to get all his crap sorted out over the summer and either deleted or moved elsewhere from the old computer.

Most of the move went relatively easy. Installation of all the different programs went well. I just had to remember which programs I actually used on a daily basis. The next step was upgrading what I had. Fortunately, there is a great little program called MozBackup, which works spectacularly with Firefox and Thunderbird. There was only one little snag with Firefox and that’s because it was telling me that CookieCuller wouldn’t work with 3.0. I knew this was wrong because I’d been using it with 3.0 for some time. After messing around for about ten minutes, I disabled CookieCuller, re-enabled it, then told it to upgrade (even though there isn’t an upgrade). After restarting Firefox, I was good to go. I guess the glitch is just with fresh installs and not upgrades.

A few clicks later and I had everything else, including Opera, the latest flash crap, OpenOffice, etc., installed and ready to go. The only thing I forgot to install was DVDShrink, but I figured I’d do that a little later since it wasn’t a high priority thing and I was quite tired. Plus, it’s considered illegal to use now, so my only copy is on a USB stick somewhere and I didn’t feel like searching for it. Even though things went smoothly, it still took me about seven hours to get everything up and running. The last thing I did, which I thought would take forever, was setting up the router. That, literally, took me about 30 seconds and I was up and running. It is, honestly, one of the few, true plug-n-play devices I’ve ever had. Or so I thought.

Since I can’t test my router from home, I had to wait until the next morning for Hendrik to log onto my FTP server and test things out. Five hours later, we finally figured it all out. It was so freaking frustrating and I owe Hendrik a pile of beef jerky for giving up half his day to help me out. First, it wouldn’t let him connect. He could connect without the router, so we knew it was a setting somewhere. Well, after trying everything under the sun, we purposefully crashed the router to forced the firmware to install and the one little tick box that wasn’t showing up, showed up.  I ticked the box and we were all set. Still, I was about to stomp on it because I was getting so mad.

In the end, everything is up and working well again. It’s nice to finally get off my butt and make everything work after blowing it off for so long. Of course, after using my neighbor’s wireless router for so long helped me in my laziness. Since she locked her router down, I was forced to sort stuff out.

Sure, it’s only a P4, but I have 4GB of RAM, a 360GB hard drive and a pretty GUI thanks to the Cylon theme from WindowBlinds.  I’m happy as a pig in mud.