under another sun

Cometh the hour, cometh the Manvinder Decided to try to maintain equilibrium today. Did what work I could on my laptop, and in the afternoon Sam came by and tried a few fixes on my computer. He zips between windows and makes lightening fast decisions on things, incredibly quickly. Had a nice chat in between various strategies. I ended up calling the Dell software helpline and actually got a rather efficient and helpful guy called Manvinder, who has reinstalled vista. I have decided to upgrade to Microsoft Windows 7, which supersedes the universally despised Vista. I noticed today on the Dell website that there were downgrades available - to change your Vista back to XP (the preceding system, which shows just how much it sucked). Meanwhile, Manvinder rather amazed when I asked him if he were Sikh. Always seems to surprise the helpline guys in India when you know anything about their country. And on an even more positive note, I've got another call from my old agency to do some wor...

Infernal day Hellish day spent trying to fix computer. Good news is that I have harvested all files, photos, tunes etc. from it. I also have an old trusty laptop. Bad news is that after 5 'helpline' conversations and reloading Vista (so inferior to XP it's not even funny) my computer is, technically speaking, utterly fucked, and I have no idea what to do about it. Initial crash sparked by a Windows update. After reloading vista, windows updates returned and crashed it even worse so that it can't even be turned on properly. Turns out my three year dell warranty only covers hardware, so fixing this is going to take some serious cash, which is badly timed. After some eight hours of this futile soul sapping, I left home and met Lorraine for a couple of calming beers and some light Japanese food. This much the best part of the day. Interestingly, I have also been in contact with Sebastian Peake, Mervyn Peake's son, who has kindly given me permission to use a photo of his...