Tech Happies and Frustrations

1) I have MY cell num­ber back, after much back and forth with Metro PCS. Yay! If you left any text or voice mail mes­sages in the last few weeks, though, they’re gone. God­dess knows I would­n’t have lis­tened to the VM any­way if there were bunch­es of mes­sages. (I hate VM, really.)

2) I have a shiny new cell phone to use with it. 

3) I haven’t actu­al­ly learned much about it yet. I’m not a twelve o’clock flash­er, but with things like phones, I usu­al­ly learn just enough to use them to my sat­is­fac­tion. If it were Sam’s, he would have already put in all the num­bers, asso­ci­at­ed spe­cial ring tones AND graph­ics with each, and emailed pho­tos to all of you. 🙂

4) I’m the proud own­er of a slight­ly-used lap­top. sam­bear did­n’t real­ly have to twist my arm to get me to buy it. I have need­ed one, and it is FAR eas­i­er to sit in bed or in the com­fy reclin­er to do things like home­work than to sit at any desk. 

5) I did a com­plete­ly new instal­la­tion of its OS (XP Pro), but was­n’t on the net­work yet and could­n’t imme­di­ate­ly join the NT (Sam­ba) domain. It just will not let me do so. Nope, not gonna.

That is high­ly annoy­ing, as the only way I can copy the files from my old PC is to log into the domain so I can get to the shared hard dri­ve. The cur­rent PC runs Win2KPro, and it won’t let any­one access the files any oth­er way.

I don’t real­ly want to have to burn the files to DVDs or CDs to get them to the new PC. Then there’s the fact that I can’t use the shared print­ers if I’m not in the domain. Blah.

I’ve found some info on the net that seems to indi­cate that my use of an exter­nal DNS might be con­tribut­ing to the prob­lem. Then there are the posts about using lmhosts. I don’t have the brain to fig­ure it out tonight, though.

6) I find it inter­est­ing that the lap­top does­n’t have a flop­py dri­ve, but it does have an SD card slot. Our PDAs and cam­eras use those, and they hold MUCH more than flop­py disks do. They aren’t near­ly as back­ward com­pat­i­ble, though, which ends all pos­si­bil­i­ties of sneak­er­net (with­out a seri­ous lit­tle dance of trans­fers, anyway).

7) I’m not EVEN going to get into tales about our attempts to go wire­less. Not yet, anyway.