If you look carefully at this picture, you’ll notice that there are all manner of holes dug in the wonderful croquet lawn in front of Kelvingrove Museum. I don’t know what they’re about, but as I passed by there today I could discern no pattern to them. Moles? Gophers? Problems with the sprinkler system? OK, maybe not with the sprinklers, as no one would need such a thing here. I’ve no idea. Technical difficulties, and no croquet for a while.
Speaking of technical difficulties, I reformatted my laptop this weekend, for the second time in 6 months. Rather than re-loading all of the resource-intensive things I had on it, I’ve kept things to a bare minimum. No more Firefox 3, because it’s a royal pig when it comes to sucking down the memory. Now more Office 2007, either, and that’s a true relief! I’m back to Office 2000, and I couldn’t be more pleased! No more idiot button! No more of the big, fat “ribbon bar” at the top! No more “X” format documents!
My system suffered from a common flaw among laptops, and in HP laptops in particular: it got too hot. When the processor would overheat, it’d give me the infamous “blue screen of death,” and nothing seemed to fix it. So, rather than taking the thing apart (sorry, Kans, I’m just not as brave as you) I went out and bought external fans for our laptops (yes, we have identical laptops – it saves on all manner of support, don’t you know). And, rather than loading in the mega-piggish programs, I’m going to stick to the small things. Things which work efficiently, cleanly, and without getting the processor to do all sorts of useless work.
And I’m oh so happy to have a clean system, with applications that I know how to use, again!
You know it’s sad, when a computer programmer with a Master’s in Information Systems, and who is a Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer, rips out the last 7 years of Microsoft products in favor of software created nearly a decade ago. Yup. Sayonara, Microsoft. It was either this, or OpenOffice.org, and … I already know how to use this stuff.


Oh dear, to both problems. At least you fixed yours. I wonder what is happening to that lawn?
I’m loving that photo at any rate, it’s on my desktop now :-). Hope your problems disappear soon!
A shame about the croquet. Couldn’t agree with you more about the overstuffed newer Microsoft programs. For those of us not as techinical as you, just doing the upgrades seems to be safer, but they do clutter up the system! Kudos to you for both the external fans and the cleaner laptop(s).
Good. I was thinking I was WAY behind the curve with my Microsoft 2000 system. It seems like every time I try to upgrade I have problems. Thanks to you I’m sticking with what I know.
A good online pictured tutorial and you’d have those laptops ripped apart in no time 🙂 Then you can be like me and do it in your sleep with no screws left over 😉 (Okay the second time I took it apart I had one screw leftover! But I saved it and put it back the third time I took it apart) LOL
PS The thing is running like a champ now 🙂