Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged

I hope I'm not speaking too soon, but my McJob seems to be working out a little better as time goes on, this could all end up around my ears tomorrow though as today, supposed to be a 'quiet' day, I had 43 drops and tomorrow is supposed to be 'busy' day, a lot of the weekend's internet purchasing ends up in the system on Monday and on my doorstep Tuesday morning, but I can't check until about 8 a.m. how much I have for the day. I just about got the delivery rate up to 10 per hour, taking about 4 1/4 hours for the 43 drops, though I only took out 41, as two were misaddressed, and there were a couple of multiple drops at the same address. Getting to know the area better is saving time and fuel and allows me to finish before it starts to get dark and slows things down again. The physical bulk of the deliveries is still variable, had a day with just 20 drops last week with as much bulk as today's 43. Both required a trip home to reload, which on just 20 drops, for which I get paid £19, I can ill afford. But overall the gross hourly rate is getting up towards £8 and the net, I guess, around £7.

A little perplexed that I have heard nothing from HMRC. I registered as self employed on 11th October via their website, which all seemed to go through without problem, but have heard nothing since?

Laptop continues to rip along very nicely, opening applications happens much quicker in the new configuration but I can't tell if this is due to Windows 7 or using 64 bit OS, not really fussed either way, just happy with the results. Still carrying 40 Gb of 'old windows' on the primary partition and will have to separate myself from this sooner or later and recover the disk space. Installed a beta test copy of Thunderbird as the email client, which looks a lot more polished that v2 which I was using previously. I haven't tried importing my address book yet, the last time around was crap, export from Outlook as CSV and them import into Thunderbird but the majority of the fields did not match and it was a bit of a dog's dinner.

Been looking at graphics cards for the desktop, Computer Shopper seemed to like Sapphire's offerings based on ATI Radeon, so I thought they would be a good place to start looking, found one that was just in the sort of price range I was looking at and whilst not a gaming fanatic I thought I might as well have as much bang for my buck as I can get and the HD4760 looked good. Came very close to clicking the 'Buy' button on eBuyer before deciding to look into it further. It seems that not only is it double height but needs two power leads separate from the juice supplied via the PCI bus. I think this may all be a little much for my humble requirements, as well as me having no idea if the juice is available or the height? I could open the case and have a look but these requirements suggest significantly more performance than I'm likely to need, so will keep looking.

Found something I really don't like about Windows 7. In Home Premium it seems that there is no ability to backup to network locations, it was present in Vista, I know, I did a backup of the laptop to my external HDD attached to the desktop machine before doing the Windows 7 install. In these days of home wireless networks, this would seem to be a significant shortcoming. When my network and all three machines are properly configured I'll have nearly 2.5 Tb of total storage available, of which just 160 Gb are on the laptop and backing up to another partition on the laptop is just not worthwhile.

...it's another. Having got Windows 7 64 bit up and running on the laptop and very happy with it so far, very stable and battery performance seems significantly improved, I went in to my desktop machine to see what I had by way of HDD setup as I have bought a new Samsung Spinpoint F3 1Tb drive to go in it and bump one of the existing ones upstairs to my daughter's machine. Haven't quite worked out how I'm going to organise this as I have a lot of data on both the existing ones and want to transfer some of it to the new F3 before doing anything else, there are two spare SATA ports on the motherboard there is no space to properly mount a third HDD. When I get in there I find that the fan on the Nvidia 6800 graphics card is knackered and whilst I don't play graphic intensive games on the machine, sooner or later it will cook itself. So that will be another £40 or so to replace it.