General Drivelly Update

You may have noticed that my blogging has been a bit infrequent of late. I put this down to a combination of various phenomena: TBTB (Too Busy To Blog), INWP (Interweb Not Working Properly) and CBA (Can't Be Arsed). CBA is a subset of INWP.

If you've been paying attention, you'll know that what Itisalot laughingly call my 'broadband' connection at home has not been working properly for months now. A long visit by an Itisalot 'engineer' only made matters worse. The technician uninstalled my Norton Internet Security and downloaded AVG. After an hour or so of scanning the gazillion files on my laptop, AVG found a worm The technician said that that was the culprit - all I had to do was wait for the scan to finish and let AVG kill the worm and all would be well. Well, it wasn't.

A few days later I re-installed Windoze. The only effect that this had was that every time I boot-up (what an appropriate phrase) the laptop, it tells me it's found a new PCI controller and an Ethernet card. It can't install the software for them, of course, because these devices are already installed. I can no longer connect to the InterWeb at my office: when I'm working there I have to throw files onto a memory stick to transfer them to another PC that is connected to the net. Arse pain in the it is.

And at home I still cannot use FTP, nor can I connect to https:// sites. But worst of all, I cannot log on to Blogger to post my lovely blogs! So I have to do the memory stick thing to my old laptop. Arse pain in the it is.

So the prospects of me having to do a complete re-format of my laptop looms large. Actually if I'm going to do that I might think about getting Windows Vista, although I'm told that one result of that could be that some of my software might not work any more. Hmmm. Probably not then.