Oh — Wowsa!

Drat!

You know, if it wasn’t for the fact that Kevin was over, I’d’ve found out that ITV4 were showing the 1980 film, “Flash Gordon”, a lot earlier!

That’s a shame, it really is.

Because however much fun the cast had, making it — a lot, I’m thinking — it was certainly a lot of fun to watch!

It still is, even after twenty-nine years!

Cheesy?

Certainly!

Loud?

Even more so!

Fun?

Absolutely guaranteed!

•••••

Oh, Hang On!

I’ve just seen an ad for Windoze 7!

That oh so easy to use ‘New Taskbar’?

Look’s like MS has copied OS X …

Again!!

•••••

But at any rate, that’s not necessarily what I was going to write about, when I started this post … !!

Bless ’im, I’ve had Kevin over, again, as he wasn’t to sure about one or two things on the laptop I’d Ubuntu’d up for him.

Most of which were things that were — for those of us a bit more computer literate — relatively simple.

You know, things like drag and drop, cut and paste, right and left clicking, stuff like that.

So today was case of just going over the basics, for him.

But was also a chance to to have Movie Night Adrian — who’s very good with IT — to have a look at it, as well, to see if he could help out.

Well …

It was seemingly having trouble booting up, as it was apparently having trouble with its Master Boot record.

Now if I’ve understood what Adrian’s told me, if we imagine a hard drive as an old fashioned vinyl record, the MBR would be like the lead-in groove that you’d put the needle onto, first.

It basically connects everything up, and tells the processor where to find the operating system, and everything else on the hard drive.

He also had a look at a look at the various bits and bobs that should — in theory — make the computer play sound.

Or play CD’s.

Make noises, at any rate …

I mean, apart from the usual noises you’d expect to hear from a whirring hard drive and CD drive, at least …

I also know that Adrian’s recommended we look at one of the alternative versions of Ubuntu, given the laptop’s not the newest piece of kit on the server farm. (It’s rather old, by modern standards; Adrian feels that running a version of Ubuntu called Xubuntu, would seriously help the performance. Something I know I’d seen on Canonical’s site, but hadn’t thought to use, as I’m not as familiar with it.)

And, again, if I’ve understood what he’s told us, correctly, it looks like I was pretty much right, when I originally guessed that Kevin’s laptop has a sound card best described as …

Well, there’s a few phrases I could put, but I know some of Councillor Chilvers’ younger readers are reading this, so I’ll settle for ‘kaput’, and leave it there.

But either way, I think, for the most part, Kevin’s happy with what he’s got; a sound card, as he said, himself, would be nice. But isn’t essential.

And what he’s got is very easy to use.