Yeah I'm fortunate that I stumbled on the Ctl-F11 "secret" -- otherwise I couln't get the dang thing to recognize my bootable CD and couln't find a way of getting to the BiOS.
Well, this afternoon was hectic! After spending the one day and evening getting it all set up, I took a break for the morning and then the extended family swarmed on me. My daughter had the task og going through piles of assorted gadgets that she I and probably others had lying around, looking for things that she needed (a card reader and a working mouse) as well as other things I had given to her that could be useful, and she was stressed about that. In the meantime I realized that seemingly all the mice laying around had been discarded for one reason or another so three of us headed out to a nearby Best Buy -- another $18.00 to the $60 cost, and we'll be needing a battery at some point, but still less than $100 so far...
And then there was the CS3 install. At one time I ran my two legit copies of CS2/CS3 off my tower workstation and of a big high-powered laptop/portable workstation, and all was good, but a couple years ago the laptop just died. It made a couple attempts to come back to life but then finally quit even trying.
Since then I've had the one copy of CS3 on my workstation and aside from that I've been through a couple cheap little laptops but not wanted another $2k machine for "serious" stuff so I've never tried to re-install CS3 on one...until today. Ran the downloaded file which did the install, and then politely informed me that I had met my limit of registered, activated copies, and I'd have to contact Adobe to deactivate one of my copies. Dang. It was too late in the day and too hectic here with a houseful so I sent them packing until later. My daughter at least is up with Lightroom, she has her photo gear, I figured she is good for the next day or two...
And then I did a bit of messing around -- we had to scrounge to find her a card reader and then we actually found three spared laying around so I sent her off with one.
Now I've been using card readers for quite some time and I remember the excruciating pain of waiting through a USB 1.0 download and how nice it was to move up to USB 2.0, so the card readers I use are all nice and fast. But come to find out that the rest of the ones laying around are all significantly slower, and that includes the one that I sent her off with. Hmm, bad pops. I hope she doesn't notice
!
But then came the phone call an hour or two ago -- she and my son are trying to get her a wireless conntection to his router and they can't figure out how!
I've never used an XP laptop, and my upstairs workstation is configured differently, these laptops have a little Fn button that you use in a key combo to activate the wireless, and I must admit, in all the hecticity of the day I never got arond to testing that out on my router -- a big part which is because my router radio has been experiencing off-and-on "death" and so I've just gotten into the habit of sitting in the living room and running an ethernet cable first with my laptop and then, naturally, with this new one -- silly me. So I spent about an hour on the phone with my son trying to discuss a laptop that I wasn't looking at...and finally just told him to google and maybe get a forum where he can get an easy anwer while he is looking at the thing, and maybe I can settle down to a relaxing evening!
And so the saga continues...!
