Had to have tetanus, polio, diptheria, hep a and typhoid immunisations last Friday in advance of forthcoming work trip to Mumbai (Bombay). What fun! Queue one seized up painful arm for Friday night and most of Saturday. To be fair I felt better than one of my work colleagues who was still not right by Monday morning - the great Southern softie!
Saturday morning we headed down to Sussex to see M's sister whose broadband needing setting up and laptop needed 'fixing'. Her ex had installed some Microsoft Onecare thing which clearly was too much for the poor things spec. It was taking 15 minutes to boot fully and was accessing the hard disk constantly (presumably from lack of available RAM as the laptop only had 256mb). Having removed Onecare (and replaced it with AVG) and having tweaked the bootup settings in Msconfig to stop it preloading lots of crap to do with quicktime/realplayer etc - the laptop booted in under 2 minutes. I then cleaned out the temp folders/caches with CCleaner (1.7gb of crap to clean - scary!) which sped it up further still. It now zips along quite nicely. The IE icon now helpfully loads Mozilla Firefox (with IE view installed just in case some sites misbehave.) Sorry Microsoft but IE7 annoys me still - particularly the not being able to right click the links toolbar and "open in new tab" - what's all that about??
Setting up the broadband was a joke - you literally plug the BT home hub into the mains and it connects itself. The wireless network key is written on the back of the hub - so you don't even need to configure one yourself. Full marks to BT for a user friendly solution. Shame my BT broadband connection is so damn awful - some evenings i get as little as 5k a second (ie dial up speeds)... worst contention ever - they really need to throttle back some of their pisstaking users. It isn't an exchange distance issue as I can get like 700k/sec sometimes in the middle of the night.
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