Alex Ferguson 2

Polite? Polite!!!! WHAT!!!! They are wasting your time and trying to rip you off, be rude.... or blunt about it.

The game is to see how long you can keep them on the phone to save someone else from being annoyed by them. I don't bother getting up to go to the computer but always complain it just crashed again, and again... Especially as I don't run Microsoft it will obviously be a scam... again. I did ask once, couldn't under stand what was being said, did they have someone who spoke English. She hung up immediately.

In New Zealand I always tell visitors it never snows before 1 January and never after 31 December. We had 6" of snow down south one Boxing Day a few decades ago. Remember, Xmas is mid summer here. This year when we were there, February, snow on the peaks while in Fiordland. Floods, yes while Germany was under water we had a couple of areas with flooding. Other times the sky will be reddish with smoke from Australia.

Arrh, that explains it, forgotten there are places with really cold bits of the year. Yes, it does get as cold or colder further south of here.

You are saying they don't have a watering can with just water in it? You are saying you have to pay for water? I only fill with clean water... and it works.... free.... If the windscreen is dirty I wash it with the free scrubber while filling with petrol.

When you have near a year of updates wiping screen and print drivers and then finally in October 2018 wiping all the data and reverting from Win10 to Win7... AND it happening to near a million people round the world, I certainly don't have any love of Windows or Microsoft. A product that you have to pay for that can't be relied on is just not on, especially when there are totally free systems that are totally reliable and are easier to use.

Install LibreOffice (FREE) and use that. It also allows editing of PDFs. Export, not Save after editing. And of course the obvious answer is to use Linux Mint to make it easy to change over too.

Those tools might have been handy but long nosed pliers were often the substitute. Mentioned above - Murphy radios, Strowger equipment as in private telephone exchanges. Yes to both. I started as a radio and TV servicing apprentice and later worked for Plessey at one time, from tape recorders (dictaphones), private telephone exchanges, VHF radios. As for exchanges, simply go out and fix them. Know anything about them? No, just go and fix it. I ended up working at a university on everything from designing and building DC supplies to fixing xray machines. Of a technology period to have worked in, it was probably the best. Design and build it. In a decade or so's time, buy it off the shelf.

You were lucky. I only had a rotary hoe to use. No recoil starter, you had to re-wrap the starter rope for each pull. Our first rotary hoe was really too big for me, handles about nose high. The next one was much smaller but wheels the same width as the rotor so needed to be held up to stop it falling over into the previously hoed row. We had 5 acres, half in bush which mean carrying winter firewood timber out on one's shoulder to father who was running the large circular saw. We did have mudflats to row and sail on or catch an outgoing tide in winter, bare feet crunching the ice as you stomped across the mud to launch. Then head out to the open sea for the day. No radio, not communications. There were two rules, be home for dinner, don't drown yourself. Oh, a third rule - obey the other two rules.

Passwords - I do to a spreadsheet, stored on a backup disk and it can be printed and stored. A copy off site would bypass a fire. No virus could corrupt the paper, only mice or woodworms to worry about. Then again, you could chip them as runes in rock for perpetuity....? When entering a new password, making one up, I'll type in in Note Book/Text Editor or some-such text only, then copy and paste, especially when it has to be put in twice and all you see are black dots. An existing password to be re-entered, you can see if you have typed it correctly before pasting it.

Depending on the browser you use in Windows, usually you can export the bookmarks in a file and import them to Firefox on Linux. Note I said "usually". I'm fairly sure I've done it a few times before. You would of course have to do it in Windows and then save the file somewhere, USB stick or .....

It might show whether a BIOS problem or not. Burn a Linux Mint iso to a spare USB stick and boot up with that. You will need to go to the BIOS and tell it the first boot item is the USB stick. Once booted, can all disks be seen? If they can it tends to say not a BIOS problem. If they can't all be seen it might mean anything, BIOS or system. It certainly won't break anything but might indicate something.

Now you've brought in global warming "a goldfish swimming calmly around the pole." There are bicyclists and bicyclists. At times I was doing well over 10,000 km a year. One rode with eyes open. Yes I hit a few cars, cars turning in front of me with out (them) looking. A cat running under the front wheel on a dark night. At least one car door in a very narrow busy street. Black ice on a cold morning. At least I'd learned how to fall, tuck & roll, so didn't damage myself.

Sheet balsa, well it is wood and paper is wood so we are only haggling over how much processing has been done to the "wood". But Yes, agreed.

A great pity you can't send hardware down the internet otherwise I could probably have fixed it. I'm quite sure it wouldn't fit down fibre..... get jammed in one of those little plug-in connectors probably.....?

Have you looked inside the power supply? A common fault is capacitors losing capacity. If any capacitor has a slightly bulged top then it is on the way out or dead. Admittedly I have had recently a perfect looking capacitor that had lost all capacity. Also if looking at capacitors, is there a small one hiding behind a bit of wiring? Had that too.

I had a problem only slightly different, hard to start, OK sometimes loss of power after a while. The coil, change it and at least that is one item of a reasonable age out of the way. That's what fixed my problem.

When bringing up the link, first in this thread, there were in the list on the right, a lot about Turing, Enigma and Bletchley Park. A step back further than a number of the thread responders here, around about when we were born. OK, I won't mention Charles Babbage and his programmer Ada Lovelace. What I'm saying is progress is so blindingly fast. OK, cynical jest. It was only about a 150 years ago, 1876 when we could first send an email to Britain, a digitally coded electronic message, originally called a telegram.

I'd suggest fitting an SSD in the laptop and installing Linux Mint. I've done a lot that way. However, as with everything, nothing is simple. The BIOS, usually switch to Legacy and Secure Boot OFF. Even getting into the BIOS depends, hold F2 and switch on.. or F9... or F10... or ESC. I must have come across just about all options by now including the Asus TP200, boot in Windows, and power down holding the OFF/ON button for 5 - 10 seconds the starting again holding F2 down - for a while. The removed disk can be run via a suitable cable with a USB plug. This means nothing is lost and at the worst, it can be reinstalled. Installation of a disk can range from one screw to 20 on the bottom, another 5 under the keyboard and then crowbarring one corner open. It all depends on the make and model of laptop. .deb "sort of" the .exe equivalent. However with what the laptop is to be used for it sounds unlikely you would need to know. In Mint the default browser is Firefox and Google as a search engine needs to be added. About 3? 4? steps to do that. The default search is Yahoo. DuckDuckGo is better. You can add Chromium as an extra browser. I always recommend "ublock origin" as an Add-on. It stops advertisements annoying you when browsing. An easy simple photo editor is gThumb from the Software Manager / repository. Simple cropping and focus and contrast editing.

You could ask Phil McCavity (on this forum) as he was installing Linux Mint. I gave him a lot of steps to make it even more usable. Send me an email if you want the documented steps/ideas. Me? I've only used it exclusively for a decade. My partner? Only used it for 2 years after her Windows was hit by a virus written by Microsoft that they called an Update and totally destroyed everything. Google "Windows October 2018" where about a million were hit. You could ask the other dozen(?), 2 dozen(?) that I've converted to Linux Mint. Basically no problems. As for viruses, no they aren't written for Linux and it is near impossible to get them to work. User forum, this one is very useful - https://forums.linuxmint.com/ You don't need to know the jargon - usually. LibreOffice - about 4 (easy) steps to install a proper (English) dictionary. As for apps, a lot are exactly the same as those (free ones) that run on Windows. If looking for software, look for .deb version. This is for Mint, about the same as .exe is in Windows. Password - you don't have to set it up needing a password before starting if you prefer not to. Also you can remove easily the password requirement after Screensave.

Down load a Linux Mint .iso file. I recommend using Mint. Burn (note burn not copy) it to a USB stick. Make sure your computer's BIOS is in Legacy, not UEFI (usually this is needed). Have the USB as first boot item, HD or SSD second. Boot up and you should have it running. One of the icons will be Install. Just go through the steps and it will take about 8 - 10 minutes for a total install. There are no .dll files, ever. HOWEVER !!!! getting into some BIOSs isn't always easy or logical. The most recent one I had, boot up in Windows, hold the OFF/ON button for more than 5 seconds as it closes down (best count to 10). Press the ON switch while holding F2 down as it boots up again. And No, it isn't always F2, could be ESC or F9 or F10 or F12, all depending on the manufacturer and model. Anyone with a specific problem or wanting the next steps in installation, I've probably come across it or done it and I presume this forum has an email a question option.

A interesting story and a happy ending so should be suitable for the Repair Shop... maybe? The last microwave oven I repaired required a small hacksaw, a chisel and a knife. These were used to shape a piece of wood. Oh!!! and you thought we were talking electronics? The wood was fastened into the microwave to stop the door catch bracket from bending back and the catches not fastening and therefore not allowing it to switch on. Simply poor construction by the manufacturer. So my background to this hi-tech repair? Called in a couple of times to fix things for NASA, and a life time of doing repairs and designing things for a University Chemistry Department. DC to daylight? No we went way above that DC to xrays at least. The most recent "domestic" repair? Our Men's Shed fridge kept blowing the RCD (circuit breaker/fuse) and it came down to electrical leakage to earth in the icebox heater. Basically a "chuck-it" though someone might use it as a beer fridge with the faulty item removed. The replacement fridge was $50 (25 pound?) second-hand from someone just up the road. It makes a change from installing operating systems (Linux) in older laptops (mainly) to keep them useful. Oh, and there is a vintage clock on the bench to rewire too. A semi-transparent drum revolves with a picture on it and the light bulb needed replacing and the wiring tidied up.

I used Norton about 2 (3?) decades ago and then AVG. For the last decade no virus checker so no slowing of the boot up time. Safe? Totally. The worst viruses were written during 2018. They were written by Microsoft (called Updates) and eventually in October of that year, Microsoft's virus (Update) wiped everything from my partner's computer. She doesn't use a virus checker now either. Linux seems to be the best and most reliable virus blocker. Another Linux Mint installation went out the door an hour ago so there should be another happy computer user. A couple of dozen done in the past year.

Posted by Geoff S on 27/01/2021 22:30:46: I'm also curious why the 'grinders' work with their arms rather than their legs like cyclists because they have a lot more muscle there. It's been done before. Geoff I've wondered that too. It was New Zealand that introduced that (pedalling) and from memory they used cyclists as crew.

Posted by John Stainforth on 26/01/2021 19:40:05: Where do you get the idea inkjets are useless. I've been using them for twenty years almost everyday. As others have said, go away for a month or so and when you return a laser prints as you want it, when you want it, no head cleaning. As for paper weight, tissue paper is a bit light. I find inkjet printers very handy as scanners, chucked out printers so they are free. We have two here, one each, both free. One a Canon the other an HP.