Chateau Keyboard

Friday, April 11: Apologetic fettling

Over to see Gordon and Patricia today to, ahem, finish setting up their nice new computer. Which actually isn't really possible at all, what with the ISDN line not being set up at all. Gordon has, on my advice, brought his laptop with him and he plugs that into the existing analogue line to do his e-mails for the time being. He's using OWA, Outlook Web Access which is cool but doesn't allow him to synchronise his Palm organiser so we look at getting Outlook to talk direct to his company's Exchange Server, but the firewall there won't let that happen apparently. I tell him that it could be done but the geeks there aren't up for it, it seems.
We do get the USB memory dongle wossname key (these things need a proper name) to work. It's a small thumb-sized widget with a memory chip that plugs straight into a USB socket. In Windows 2000 and XP it's recognised automagically and appears in My Computer as just another disc. You can drag and drop files to and fro with the greatest of ease, and very good it is too. For Windows 98 and below you need to work out what on earth you've actually got, spend an hour searching the Dell website, give up ever finding anything there because it doesn't acknowledge the existance of Windows 98 any more, read the information from Device Manager on a Windows XP machine about what device it actually is that Dell are rebadging and then go off and find drivers for that. Which, being five megabytes in size, you then need to burn to a CD to get them onto the Windows 98 machine. And then you need to reboot the W98 machine each time you plug it in to get it recognised. I tell you, upgrade isn't a good enough word to describe the move from Windows 98 to XP - it's more of an evolutionary leap akin to the one between crawling out of the ocean for the first time and driving up the motorway at 150 mph.
And then we find a message on G&P's France Telecom answering machine from some woman who claims to be In Charge Of ISDN, wanting to make an appointment to send a bloke round to fix it all together. Good grief. So we call her up and she agrees that someone will be round on Tuesday afternoon, some time after 1400. They need to do something at the exchange first and then come round, so don't expect them at 1400 on the dot, she says.
Blimey. As in, Blimey, I'll believe all this when I see it.
Then I try connecting the desktop to the modem I've stolen from Mrs K's computer (don't tell her) but it's having none of it; the APC UPS believes that it's been told to hibernate the computer the moment the modem is plugged in. As G can use the laptop to achieve the same end, I advise him to continue with that for now and head off to Mas du Cantarel to start this weekend's masterclass.
Audrey is over from the Charente Maritime to learn more about Windows XP and video editing, but tonight is really about having a slap-up dinner courtesy of Jan and her excellent cooking. Which is nice, albeit at the expense of a late night. It's very nice for the Masterclass students to dine finely and then sleep the sleep of the pampered, but I have a half-hour drive home and then a load of questions to answer for the next hour before I can get any kip. Good grief.