New Email

ARghhh!!!

Holidays start next week. And guess how I'm spending my day? Sending out email change notices.

Last month, OneBitCPU heard that our ISP (also our phone service) will upgrade us, free, from 1M to 3M service, but we needed a newer modem. That went farily smoothly.

Then, we got our phone bill two weeks late, and they'd done the equipment exchange fine, and but they'd given us back half our internet fee and cancelled the longdistance plan that was bundled to it.

So, I call, and am told that I have to choose a new LD plan -- huh? He'd confirmed no change when he upgraded! And they don't offer the bundle anymore, and the internet will be on separate bill from sister company.


Last night, OneBitCPU calls to set up new LD plan, and put internet account on credit card automatic billing. The account won't accept payment, no way, no how, even cold, hard cash

Finally get manager. We get "secret" long distance plan for a year, and the old internet account had been cancelled -- complete with most of our email. Effective Monday, or so. And the email addresses associated with it -- gone, for 2-6 months.

And we can't get a new DSL account until the other one is truly toast, not without big bucks and cable laying.

So, we now have a working dialup account with a new name, for use when the current DSL dies -- not sure when.

And, on Monday night, OneBit will call the manager and we'll upgrade that account to DSL.

Sigh.

So, I get to go through all the email, including net registrations, and inform everyone. Except two months ago, he changed hard drives. And didn't bring over the address books right. I hadn't bothered to fix it at the time. So, I'm spending the day going through all our email so we can tell everyone.

On the bright side, as of last night, we are the proud owners of the domain onebit.ca, with lots of email options. We will be free to change ISP without affecting our email.


Anyhoo, the new address is cricket@onebit.ca.

Cheers!

Cricket

__________________
Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

- Viktor E. Frankl

I forgot to mention -- when he upgraded the hard drive, it started crashing at random.

Sometimes, it comes back -- usually this is when it was just overloaded. Moslty, it doesn't. So, reboot a few times a day. Gotten very good about intermediate saves.

He thought it was the removable hard drive trays. Removed them. No crashes for a few days.

Then maybe overheating. Instal monitor software for temp and fan speed. NEver goes above 32 C -- shouldn't be a problem, but he thinks it is. So, borrow air compressor from work, lug the thing upstairs, and amuse the kids by blowing it out. Still probs.

Now he suspects the memory, or the drive from work that was to be our temporary data drive.

Sigh.

Canada Post is looking very good these days.

__________________
Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

- Viktor E. Frankl

Just kick it a coupla times, that usually works for mine.

Hmm, not to my knowledge hun one sure giveaway that the read head is on the way out is if you are getting lots of bad sectors, scandisk the surface of the disk (takes a while) to see how well it is.

If it hasn't got more then say 5 bad sectors your hubby might not have set the drive up correctly in the Bios settings.

__________________
Thanks Cep

Gatchamania.net Administrator

Are you on Win 2k hun? (I think you said you were)

Anyway scandisk is on this system but its cunningly hidden away, go into my computer and right click the hard drive, you should see scan disk is on the menu.

__________________
Thanks Cep

Gatchamania.net Administrator

Says that both disks are fine. Actually, it just says the check is complete, and doesn't say if it found a big honking alien chewing up the substrate or not.

Sigh.

Then again, last time we had a disk problem, we only found it because hubby was installing Linux on a partition. Don't really want him playing around with Linux again -- I was on the kids' machine for months.

But, it's vacation, and there's a last coat of paint to put on. Can't let hubby and friend have all the fun.

Oh, and a backup to do. Can't forget that.

(BTW -- count this as official notice to site admin that I'll be away for up to a month, depending on holidays and modems)

__________________
Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

- Viktor E. Frankl

And, we are back. And I'm flipping between trying to read all the posts for the last few weeks, or just skipping any that began and ended while I was away.

After deciding, virtuously, to leave the laptop at home, the big machine died while OneBitCPU was making the backup to take with us.

So, we took the machine.

While there, he did disk tesks and memory tests and other fun stuff. And found memory errors.

Long story made short, and you can imagine the fun of coming up with this conclusion, including buying a new memory stick:

We can run just fine on any one memory stick, but not two. The hard drives are just fine.

So, I'm running marginally slower than normal. Seems every time we upgrade one thing, something unrelated fails at the same time. So I ain't rocking the boat.

Cricket

__________________
Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

- Viktor E. Frankl