my family's computers, and one last new year's principle.

[grey_ghost]

i suppose there's nothing wrong with one more new year's principle, and nothing further wrong with making one after the clock's struck midnight, january first.

this was also motivated by an off-&-on day of tech support for my parents' computers. [1] their holiday gift this year: a new hard drive tower (from my sibs and me).

but i digress. the principle at hand is ..

to convert prospero into a dual-boot machine: windows xp and ubuntu linux .. that is, unless my friend pekka wins me over with gentoo linux .. (;

on an unrelated note, today i put off mathematics work and instead did some image editing. on my flickr page, there are some new photos posted:

[ the link ]
there you get to see me sport .. well, a sports jacket, which i lifted from my brother K. admittedly, i look quite dashing, if i may say so. (;

[1] in my parents' house, there are 3+ computers:

1. the main computer (with the new hard drive tower) which runs windows xp, along with its conveniences and inconveniences;
   
   
2. my sister's old laptop, which runs windows millenium edition and has been a family dependable for a while. for example: before my parents bought the dvd player, it functioned in that role (having a tv port), and for a while, it was the only computer in the house with a working phone modem.
   
   unlike the recent make of laptops, it also possesses a floppy drive.
   
   
3. my parents' old computer, which runs windows 98 and has a floppy drive and a cd drive. that's it. recently my parents discovered the joys of usb flash drive, but win98 doesn't have pre-installed drivers to recognize them.
   
   so the usual approach doesn't work: my mom's flash drive didn't come with a driver CD. one cannot use the flash drive to transfer the device driver files, because the driver is needed to use the flash drive. so one needs to go online and find the driver and save it to a floppy and then install it on the old computer from the floppy drive.
   
   neither the new family computer nor my laptop has a floppy drive, so that means we:
   
   use my sister's old laptop,
   (which is a fine machine, by the way, but the processor is slow and the fan insufficient),
   
   dial-up through AOL,
   download a 1.3mb file,
   copy it to a floppy disk,
   (but having no preformatted ones available, we have to sit through the formatting process on top of the slow machine-write speeds of the technology of yesteryear; so that's how i spent 15-20 minutes of my life)
   
   and install it on the old statesman of a computer.
   
   the process is pretty simple, in theory. the hard part was explaining to both mom and dad why i needed the phone modem .. in cantonese. and then there were the questions about music and my dad's mp3 player, and then about the digital camera ..