Ah, weekends
Nov. 19th, 2006 08:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenayDear Spinal Column,
Yes, I did housework. I shifted stuff, sorted, tidied and vacuumed. This is not your cue to really, really, really hurt. So cut it out, will you?
No love,
Me
In other news, yesterday was really good fun. I met up with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
paranoidangel42, kate_closet and blonde_sheep for a few hours in London and it was really good to see them all again. We lost kate_clost and blonde_sheep when we got to the Canadian pub for a drink and discovered it was incredibly busy, but PA stayed on with me for a while. I tried not to watch the rugby match that was showing and failed miserably. Bad Sel.
Best Friend in America arrived later in the afternoon and we had a fabulous time. PA went to ZZ9 around 6pm (hopefully BFiA and I didn't bore you too much...) and somehow BFiA and I time-travelled because the next thing we knew it was 8pm and we should have started back to our homes ages ago. Oops.
In our defense, there's two years of stuff to catch up on and we've always been terrible for talking too much :-) It was fabulous to see her again. We'll be meeting up again on Friday - she's coming out for my birthday do. She's staying the night on my floor (hence the housework) so we'll probably sit up all night talking, as we have a bad habit of doing. Then she'll be going back to America next weekend, but with plans that she'll be back again sometime next year.
Today has mostly been about housework and doing computer things. The good news is that I got my new microphone set up so I can now chat to people from the computer. The bad news is that I'm having problems with external storage devices - they're working rather randomly. I've managed to get my card reader to work plugged directly into a port on the back of the machine, which is rather inconvenient. It refuses to work on the extension cable to the same port. Grrr. Haven't experimented with the iPod this weekend to find out which ports it likes. I'm not sure whether I want to try experimenting with the extension cable.
The ports on the front of the machine just plain hate external storage devices, but they're happy with my graphical table. Anyone else have these kinds of issues? I'm slightly worried because the first sign that my old laptop was dying was when it started dislking the outside world and I don't want to buy a new desktop before I emigrate. Computers sometimes drive me nuts.
Yes, I did housework. I shifted stuff, sorted, tidied and vacuumed. This is not your cue to really, really, really hurt. So cut it out, will you?
No love,
Me
In other news, yesterday was really good fun. I met up with
paranoidangel42, kate_closet and blonde_sheep for a few hours in London and it was really good to see them all again. We lost kate_clost and blonde_sheep when we got to the Canadian pub for a drink and discovered it was incredibly busy, but PA stayed on with me for a while. I tried not to watch the rugby match that was showing and failed miserably. Bad Sel.Best Friend in America arrived later in the afternoon and we had a fabulous time. PA went to ZZ9 around 6pm (hopefully BFiA and I didn't bore you too much...) and somehow BFiA and I time-travelled because the next thing we knew it was 8pm and we should have started back to our homes ages ago. Oops.
In our defense, there's two years of stuff to catch up on and we've always been terrible for talking too much :-) It was fabulous to see her again. We'll be meeting up again on Friday - she's coming out for my birthday do. She's staying the night on my floor (hence the housework) so we'll probably sit up all night talking, as we have a bad habit of doing. Then she'll be going back to America next weekend, but with plans that she'll be back again sometime next year.
Today has mostly been about housework and doing computer things. The good news is that I got my new microphone set up so I can now chat to people from the computer. The bad news is that I'm having problems with external storage devices - they're working rather randomly. I've managed to get my card reader to work plugged directly into a port on the back of the machine, which is rather inconvenient. It refuses to work on the extension cable to the same port. Grrr. Haven't experimented with the iPod this weekend to find out which ports it likes. I'm not sure whether I want to try experimenting with the extension cable.
The ports on the front of the machine just plain hate external storage devices, but they're happy with my graphical table. Anyone else have these kinds of issues? I'm slightly worried because the first sign that my old laptop was dying was when it started dislking the outside world and I don't want to buy a new desktop before I emigrate. Computers sometimes drive me nuts.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
What gmul said!
Date: 2006-11-19 11:29 pm (UTC)Also a USB port should be able to provide a certain amount of power (500milliamps) but if the front ports are just daisy chained from the rear ones, then maybe there isn't enough power to go around all the devices.
My recommendation (if you can afford it) is to go to Maplin and buy a brown box USB card (£9.99 last time I checked) which just plugs into a spare slot in your PC and gives you brand new and wonderful USB ports. It's what I did on my old PC when I wanted to connect an external hard drive at a sensible speed.
Extension cables, again you may find that some are better than others (and length comes into it to, though I doubt your's is over 10 feet long!), older cheaper cables may have problems with interference at high speed (and even timing problems).
Re: What gmul said!
Date: 2006-11-20 12:21 pm (UTC)I'll have a look into the possibilities you and gmul have suggested and see what port types the various types are on the machine. We've now established that one of the memory card readers that I was trying (the one that completely locked up my system when attempting to access it) was in fact faulty - it locked up another computer last night despite not locking up my dad's laptop when we tried it there.
The one thing that I haven't tried is experimenting with the external hard drive. That has its own power supply and I didn't have issues with it a couple of weeks ago. But the computer was having a good USB day that day so I need to check again. Then I'll start working out exactly what works where and how before deciding whether I put in new cards or other fun things :-)