I want my, I want my, I want my VGA....
Jan. 5th, 2013 08:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogThere's no other reasonable explanation. My computer is dying like a dead thing.
I've had this laptop for over four years, and in addition to its cosmetic lumps and bumps (particularly its recently updated NWERTY keyboard), its battery doesn't last much more than about 10 minutes, its dedicated sound button works only about a third of the time, it saves spreadsheets to random hexadecimal-named files about every third day, and, tonight, it resigned from our multimedia centre.
Or, rather, it mostly did. Just yesterday, I bought Season 3 of Portlandia, which debuted on IFC (which stands for "We Don't Get It on Time Warner") last night. iTunes duly informed me that the premiere, plus a bonus ep, were available for download this morning, and so I duly roped them into my collection and set up the living room TV to stream them as I've been doing for lo these past several years with Whos, Youtubes and other c-drived thingies.
Until tonight, that is, when the usual setup produced a "No Cable Connected" message on the bigscreen. I rebooted the 'puter, reset the power on the teevee, and briefly watched Windows booting on the tv until the loading of Vista again went back to "No Cable Connected." Various Control Panel fixes failed to fix, and I quickly got grumpy about the future of our technology....
until remembering there were other voices in other rooms. Or at least one of each.
----
Months ago, I set up an XP computer in Emily's room, which we'd inherited from Cameron's family, got a complete rebuild of from my guru, and attached a nice (if smaller than the living room) VGA monitor to, and it's become our primary puter for various cranky old programs that don't play well with Vista.
Yet it also works with Vista- or at least that monitor does. I moved my laptop into Em's room, bypassing the XP tower for a direct connect to my own machine, and Portlandia appeared apace. With a little bit of rearranging, and with a perfectly serviceable futon in there that the kids aren't using right now, Eleanor and I had one of the coziest viewing experiences we've had in awhile, as both of the initial S3 episodes came through with decent picture and sound, and with one dog and one cat, respectively, sharing the sofa with us for the better part of the two viewings.
I will continue backing shit up over the coming days, and will plan to have a more stable laptop in place before the board gets even weirder, but on the whole, we made vitual lemonade out of these 1's and 0's of lemons. And the only other thing to say is, Namaste!:
I've had this laptop for over four years, and in addition to its cosmetic lumps and bumps (particularly its recently updated NWERTY keyboard), its battery doesn't last much more than about 10 minutes, its dedicated sound button works only about a third of the time, it saves spreadsheets to random hexadecimal-named files about every third day, and, tonight, it resigned from our multimedia centre.
Or, rather, it mostly did. Just yesterday, I bought Season 3 of Portlandia, which debuted on IFC (which stands for "We Don't Get It on Time Warner") last night. iTunes duly informed me that the premiere, plus a bonus ep, were available for download this morning, and so I duly roped them into my collection and set up the living room TV to stream them as I've been doing for lo these past several years with Whos, Youtubes and other c-drived thingies.
Until tonight, that is, when the usual setup produced a "No Cable Connected" message on the bigscreen. I rebooted the 'puter, reset the power on the teevee, and briefly watched Windows booting on the tv until the loading of Vista again went back to "No Cable Connected." Various Control Panel fixes failed to fix, and I quickly got grumpy about the future of our technology....
until remembering there were other voices in other rooms. Or at least one of each.
----
Months ago, I set up an XP computer in Emily's room, which we'd inherited from Cameron's family, got a complete rebuild of from my guru, and attached a nice (if smaller than the living room) VGA monitor to, and it's become our primary puter for various cranky old programs that don't play well with Vista.
Yet it also works with Vista- or at least that monitor does. I moved my laptop into Em's room, bypassing the XP tower for a direct connect to my own machine, and Portlandia appeared apace. With a little bit of rearranging, and with a perfectly serviceable futon in there that the kids aren't using right now, Eleanor and I had one of the coziest viewing experiences we've had in awhile, as both of the initial S3 episodes came through with decent picture and sound, and with one dog and one cat, respectively, sharing the sofa with us for the better part of the two viewings.
I will continue backing shit up over the coming days, and will plan to have a more stable laptop in place before the board gets even weirder, but on the whole, we made vitual lemonade out of these 1's and 0's of lemons. And the only other thing to say is, Namaste!: