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.

And running very sweetly as it happens. Not without the odd problem though, but only due to an existing problem with the laptop, which I think I have now sorted. The laptop wouldn't boot for a while when I was trying to start the installation of Windows 7, using the 64 bit DVD, whenever I tried to access the BIOS to change the boot order or the boot menu, it would just shut down. This problem had occurred before and I think it is due to overheating, so I got the vacuum cleaner out and sucked out whatever dust had accumulated around the fan and it seems fine.

The install took a very reasonable 40 mins, three reboots I think and I only had one concern that it had hung when the progress bar was at about 80% and the HDD light on solidly but it soon started flickering again and went through to the end without problem. Had to do a clean install to go from 32 bit Vista to 64 bit Windows 7, but that was my intention anyway.

Not had any driver problems with any devices within the laptop but the problem which was flagged for my networked printer, a Canon iP4300, has occurred. I haven had time to check the Canon website to see their comments.

I can't say that the claimed improvement in boot time is happening, the time to the logon screen may be better but the time to have use of applications after logon seems much longer.

Downloaded plenty of updates, probably around 250Mb, and anti virus and Firefox added another 100Mb, still got to get Thunderbird for my mail and a Twitter client but after that, should be pretty much done and if I'd stayed at it all evening then the whole thing would be about 5 hours to be just about back where I was.

I expect the desktop machine to be a little more demanding as there are many more devices attached, but that's for another day.

Ordered Windows 7, 3 licence Family Pack Home Premium today from Staples, free next day delivery apparently, but will probably not get to do any installs before the weekend. A little concerned about the way some sites have been advertising Windows 7, whilst the price is the same, they advertise separate 32 & 64bit versions? It was my understanding that all versions were on each DVD and it was just a matter of which you chose to install, paying a fee to upgrade to Pro or Ultimate? Not too fussed, will go with 32bit if necessary, but was certainly planning on putting the 64bit version on the laptop, seeing if any problems cropped up and making a decision about the other two desktops once I had got it bedded in on the laptop.

I got to have my little shuftle around Maplins yesterday, it was interesting but not enthralling. Not a huge shop so may be others carry more stock or it's just there online presence that seems to have a huge number of product lines. It doesn't seem to be the 'go to source' for any particular category of gear, a little computer gear, a little home electronics and remote control stuff and a lot of odds and sods. The computer stuff was disappointing, just a couple of flat panel monitors out, both looked over priced, a bunch of own brand HDDs, again looking over priced, call me a snob but at their prices I'll stick to brand names. They did some external HDDs, brand names, at what I thought were reasonable prices. One thing I didn't was a reasonable price, but it's a long time since I bought one, was an air duster at £13??

I did come away with a cheap weather monitor, temperature and humidity inside and out, max and min temperature and barometric pressure history for preceding 24 hours, not much better than sticking your head out the door, but a little. Whenever I have time I will have a browse there but I can't foresee any circumstance when I come up short of some tool or thing whilst in the middle of doing something and I suddenly think, 'I know, I'll pop into Cambridge and get it from Maplins'.

It seems I may get chance to look at one of their shops finally. I get a regular email from them, each about 6 pages long, of, mostly, non-essential gadgetry though there looks to be some useful stuff in there as well and I've wondered for a while just how much stock they carry in their shops? Maybe I should leave the plastic at home??

I've posted a few times about my dithering over whether to upgrade to Windows 7 and seem to have had quite a few page hits but I did ask last weekend if anyone had installed Windows 7 and if they would let me have any comments on how things went. But not heard a thing from anybody. I'm not looking for great technical treatises on Windows 7, just a couple of lines on how the install went, particularly if going from 32bit Vista to 64bit Windows 7?

C'mon peeps, someone out there must have given in to the white hot maelstrom of MS hype, loving it, hating it, anything??