A Very Rushed Surgery

Today's surgery for me was rather a rushed affair, and I apologise for my rushed exit, and especially to Colin who had made me a very nice cup of coffee that had to be left suddenly so that I could go to sing with my choir in a wedding. Colin and Dai, under the watchful eye of Mike kept the surgery goung very efficiently.

This is a snap of the Pelenna Valley Male Voice Choir on their trip to Catalunia last year.

Having looked at the jobs that seem to be coming in to the surgery lately, we seem to be working a lot wit laptops, and most of the problems are software. It was interesting to see the little BBC video about the possibility of laptops for all. with interesting comments about ways to prevent problems - keeping moving parts to a minimum being a priority to prevent mechanical breakdown. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6908946.stm)

What a day! What a month! Flaming June and July Came into the Centre nice and wet. Cup of coffee first then the first problem was an old parallel port printer that could not be connected to a modern laptop. the ideal solution, unfortunately seemed to be a new printer, as a printer could be obtained cheaper than the adaptor cable. We are still working on a laptop that will not start. At the moment things do not look too good as the hard disk seems to be somewhat corrupt.

What's a Floppy Disk?

We have a rather difficult problem which has taken us some research to possibly resolve.

One problem with old motherboards is that they are unable to recognise hard disk drives above a certain level. One way to get over this is to put on a "cap" jumper. The motherboard should then recognise the HDD but its capacity would be limited to the maximum allowed by the motherboard. We thought that it would be necessary to update the BIOS, and to do this we needed to use a floppy disk (whatever that is - I think I have some vague memory of things like that!!)

The actual problem was, however far more complex, and to date has not yet been resolved.

Other problems this week were a set of disappearing shortcuts and a problem with installing a new printer.