Tag Archives: acer aspire

Sunday 21st June 2015 – HAPPY SOLSTICE

Yes, the longest day of the year today. It’s all downhill from here. Where did the first 6 months of the year go?

And so I celebrated the Solstice by having a lie-in, seeing as it was Sunday today. And in view of the late night that I had had (02:30 when I finally crawled in), it was a good 10:15 when I eventually crawled out and gone 11:00 by the time that I had finished breakfast.

As for the laptop, it had indeed run out of battery so while I was breakfasting, I put it on charge in the barn using the 12-volt power lead that I have.

After breakfast, I spend a pleasant couple of hours going through the hard drive on the 1st Aspire, deleting loads of things that I no longer needed, deleting all kinds of programs and editing the start-up memory. Now, it fires up in seconds rather than the 10 minutes that it used to take and all in all, it’s now quite a stable platform.

But here’s a thing. I remember when I bought it that it had just 2GB of RAM on board, and that’s what it says on the sticker. But when I checked the system, it clearly shows that there is 4GB there. I don’t remember upgrading it, but I suppose that I must have done at some point when I was in the UK. And that might account for how much better it performs when compared to any of its later brothers. Upgrading this one to 8GB might just work because if i can make this perform as well as the 1st Aspire, then I’ll be reasonably satisfied.

This afternoon, I’ve been tidying up in here and for a change just recently, it’s now fit to receive visitors. I’ve even scrubbed the oilcloth that I use as a tablecloth on the table which I use for preparing the food.

I did set out to have a shower too, but the weather was deceiving. Although it looked quite a nice day outside, it wasn’t that warm – and the water in the solar shower was a mere 30°C. The water in the home-made 12-volt immersion heater that I use as a dump load was only 54°C so I couldn’t put enough of that into the solar shower to raise the temperature sufficiently.

Mind you, that was my own fault. Feeling like having a coffee this afternoon, I had the electric coffee percolator going for half an hour. Coffee made in there tastes so much better than instant coffee, but it isn’t half energy-consuming.

So back to work tomorrow – fitting the worktop in the shower room and then starting on the door frame. I really will have a shower tomorrow if it’s warm, and if I can’t have it in the solar shower, I’ll use the corner of the verandah and a bucket of hot water from the home-made 12-volt immersion heater.

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Saturday 20th June 2015 – WHAT AN AFTERNOON!

I’ve been sitting here all afternoon waiting for the battery on the laptop to expire. I’ve been extolling the virtues of the impressively long battery life, but it does have a drawback.

I dunno if you remember but I’ve been having memory issues with the new laptop. It simply isn’t powerful enough to run Windows 8.1 and after a while, it slows right down and it is necessary to restart it.

However today, I was distracted by a few things while I was copying a few things from one external drive to another. When I came back, the machine was showing an error message “insufficient memory to run these programs please close …” and then it listed all of the programs. Like Firefox, VLC player and the copying software. That was all that was open.

If that weren’t bad enough, it wouldn’t respond to the ctrl/alt/del escae mechanism to enable me to close the programs, and the cursor had frozen so I couldn’t access the menu.

While I was fiddling around with this, the screen switched off and won’t restart, and this is where I’ve been for the last 7 hours, waiting for the battery running out so it will all go into suspense.

I cant switch off using the crash button because this will stall all of the hard drives in mid-operation and that can have fatal results as we know. So thank heavens for the ancient Aspire 722 with its smashed screen and broken keyboard. I’m giving serious thought to refurbishing it and pressing it back into service.

Last night I was playing football for Pionsat, up front with Anthony. I passed the ball to him and the keeper dashed off his line to clear the ball from Anthony’s feet, but missed his kick and stubbed his toe, injuring himself. Everyone stood around waiting for the ref’s whistle but it never came so I shouted to Anthony to play on So he kicked the ball towards the goal but, incredibly, it was going wide from such an easy position. So he had to run after it and pop it into the net. At which point the referee disallowed the goal as he said that the game had stopped, although he had never blown the whistle. This led to a huge and heated argument.

It was all rather reminiscent of an incident in gridiron a few years ago when a thrown ball was intercepted but not caught or deflected out out of play. It was therefore still a live ball (classed as a fumble) but everyone stood around for a good 30 seconds looking at it before a player suddenly realised what had happened, picked it up and ran for home.

From here, I went on to Australia and went into an office which was an old brick-built circular building with, exceptionally, the (male) receptionist sitting in the centre of the room with his back to the door looking inwards. I had a small office on the ground floor and I was doing all kinds of personal things there, without realising until much later that there was a CCTV camera looking right at me.

Outside, it was hot and dusty and bright sunlight, and I had to walk acrosss the road to the trafic light and take up my position to run home amid all of the traffic, reckoning that even over a very long run I could keep up with rush-hour traffic on foot. I remembered an overhead railway with all kinds of brightly-coloured locomotives passing by.

This brought a feeling of déjà vu, with something that I had done in a particular nightly ramble several years (during one of the previous incarnations of this rubbish) ago when I used to go running from our old house in Davenport Avenue Crewe via Shavington and Stapeley into Nantwich and then back home via Wistaston. That of course relates to the “incident” in 1994 when I was caught up in a certain event in the middle of the night in Brussels and then had difficulty sleeping for years afterwards, so I started running around the city late at night in order to tire me out. But that didn’t work because I found my second wind pretty quickly and ended up doing half-marathons every night.

This morning, I had to make some more muesli for breakfast and then I started on thie mega-back-up that has led to all of these problems.

I hope that thgis problem is all going to clear itself up soon because I can’t go on like this.

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Monday 8th June 2015 – I THINK …

sawn through top of black and decker workmate les guis virlet puy de dome france… that I am going to have to find a new top for my old Black and Decker workmate. I thought that the circular saw was making hard work of that final cut on the top of the beichstuhl this evening.

It’s a fine old workmate too – getting on for 30 years old. Nerina bought it for me in the days when Black and Decker stuff was good, when I was planning on making some fitted wardrobes at Gainsborough Road. She reckoned that it might motivate me to do them, and I did too!

It’s been around Europe with me on all kinds of construction sites and it’s outlived a couple of more modern reincarnations which have failed to last the pace.

Yes, I’ve been working again. Cutting out and smoothing out the lunette in the top of the beichstuhl, and then cutting out the lid for the sawdust container.

It”s all been sanded down and fitted with reinforcing struts – not that it needs them but I’d look pretty silly if it were to. I can finish it off tomorrow and give it the first coat of wood treatment

Apart from that, I spent the morning on the laptop talking to Acer. seeing as I’ve been having some success about various matters on various forums, I attacked Acer today about my new laptop which is painfully slow with Windows 8.1.

The official helpdesk guy was no help at all but the self-help forum came up trumps. I was given a whole list of things to switch off and to delete, and told where and how I can reduce screen graphics to a minimum. That has certainly bumped up the speed and it’s roaring along now like it ought to do.

Even more interestingly, upgrading the RAM from 2GB to 8GB is staightforward. It’s standard DRAM 3 stocked everywhere and someone is going to find a plan of how to fit it. This one is not like the other ACER Aspire laptops with the service hatch underneath – you need to take the case right apart to get into it.

Rosemary rang up for a chat, and I had an interesting chat with a cold caller. He didn’t understand my lifestyle at all – it made no sense to him whatsoever

So tomorrow I’ll continue in the shower room? We’re are advancing quite slowly, but advancing all the same.

And with today’s water temperature in the solar shower at 33°C and the water in the home-made 12-volt immersion heater where all of the excess solar energy goes being over 70°C when I knocked off, 5 litres out of the latter into the former gave me a glorious solar shower to finish off the day.

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Thursday 28th May 2015 – OHH WOW!

New laptop arrived this morning, all 500GB of it. Yet another tough, resilient Acer Aspire (I hope) but a very much different model. Most of the plugs (USB connections, mains lead, HDMI cable, ethernet plug) go in the back where you can’t see them, and isn’t that going to be a recipe for disaster in a confined space?

It has a British keyboard (so I’ve ordered some keyboard stickers) and a British lead on the power pack; which is what I wanted. But trhe charger isn’t an Acer one, but a cheap aftermarket Chinese one; the kind that you buy for €2:99 off eBay. At least though the lead to the power pack is unpluggable so that one can acquire European and North American leads for it. Unfortunately, it’s not a type of lead that I have around here.

And here’s a thing. Many of you will remember me losing a portable hard drive when I was in Brussels 2 years ago. All of my 3D files – tons of the stuff, much of which can’t now be replaced – went with it and started something of a panic that I have still not quite resolved.

But there I was, cleaning out the drive on the 1st Aspire – the one with the broken scren and smashed keyboard that I’ve been using just now – and Lo! And behold! Here are all of the files, and every last one of them too, in all their glory, sitting in a clearly-labelled “TEMP” directory where I must have assembled them when I copied them to the portable drive. I blame old age myself.

But this series of good nights sleeps continued again. Once more, I was well away with the fairies during the night, doing some shopping at a farm shop, patiently waiting my turn in the queue. Finally, it came to me and as I stepped forward, one of the previous customers pushed her way in, handed the assistant a birthday card and started to chat. I had quite a few words to say on this subject, as you can imagine.

So after my early breakfast, I cracked on with the radio programmes and I’ve finally finished despite the numerous distractions. Terry came round for a chat and to make plans for a future project, someone rang up (and I can’t remember who it was now) and I was having a long chat with someone on the internet.

Not only that, the glorious day today saw 180 amp-hours of surplus solar energy into the home-made 12-volt immersion heater. That took the temperature off the scale (ie over 70°C) and with the water in the solar shower at 33°C, I added 5 litres of hot water (that took it to 39°C) and I had the most glorious solar shower. First for a while and now I’m ready for anything, even Radio Tartasse tomorrow morning.

Now I’m backing up all my files and when it’s finished, I’m off to bed.

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Monday 18th May 2015 – AS YOU MIGHT EXPECT …

… we had something of a slow start this morning. After my long drive of yesterday and my bad night’s sleep thanks to the Swiss Highway Patrol, I was in no mood for an early start.

Nevertheless, I did heave myself out of my stinking pit at something like a reasonable hour and after breakfast I set to work.

And the result of today’s efforts is, quite frankly, in the words of the old poem three-fifths of five-eights of … errr … badger all.

Anyone reading this rubbish will recall that the laptop that packed up on my voyage is my second Acer Aspire. The first one has a broken screen and a smashed keyboard where something fell on it (but despite that, this is what I’m using regardless, with “cut-and-paste” for the missing letters and manoeuvring the workspace around the screen, which shows you just how resilient they are, not to mention the five hours battery life) so the idea was quite simple – two identical machines so just swap the hard drives over.

After about two hours, during which time I realised that despite the outer casing being identical, they are far from identical inside and not even the batteries will swap over. Moving the disks produces the error message “No bootable device detected” even though the disks are both being picked up by the BIOS.

Acer’s technical help was interesting too. On their live chat system, I had a brief discussion with a “technician” who then copy-pasted a huge long screed about “you need to send your machine in for repair. Please send us £50-odd to open a file for you, and then we will send you instructions”.

So much for that.

The ultimate solution to the problem is a new machine. And there was an Acer Aspire – a more up-to-date version of mine – for £219 which by the time I’ve added the £50 for the file, the cost of a new hard drive, the labour for the installation and the postage and packing is mere peanuts.

So that is that. Meanwhile, any tips for hacking the information out of the old failed drive would be much appreciated.

On that note I went down to the Intermarche in Pionsat to buy some food seeing as how there is nothing here to eat. But badger that for a moment – here’s something exciting.

old citroen 2CV intermarche pionsat puy de dome France may 2015You can tell by the louvred bonnet that this is one of the earliest Citroen 2CV’s, and the deckchair interior goes to prove it too.

And while I was having a good look around, the owner came out. None other than Marianne’s friend Francois Legay, who has quite an interesting collection of old vehicles.

This Citroen is a 1952 model and is about 98% original. The seat material, the cooling fan and one or two other bits and bobs have been replaced, mainly due to the difficulty of resourcing the original parts.

There’s a 375cc engine in there, air-cooled of course, and flat-out, downhill with a following wind the car might just manage 70kph.

So that cheered me up somewhat, and I went off quite happily to do my shopping.

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Saturday 4th April 2014 – THAT’S MUCH MORE LIKE IT!

Indeed it is. I turned over this morning to look at the clock and … 09:00. “Badger this for a game of cowboys!” I told myself and curled back up underneath the quilt.

10:30 was when I finally heaved myself out of my stinking pit, and quite tight too. Nothing wrong with a good long lie-in, especially as I’m on a nice Spring break for Easter. No danger of me working on a Bank Holiday weekend!

Having said that however, it’s not all beer and skittles. Saturday isn’t officially a Bank Holiday and so seeing as I do have some work to do tht didn’t involve me leaving the settee, then after breakfast I set to work.

By the time the battery went flat in the laptop (this 5-hour battery life in my little Acer Aspire notebook is really the business) I’d written 5 weeks’ worth of radio programmes and a 1500-word text for the main topic on our Radio Anglais programmes.

Just a little finishing off and then I can start the rock music programmes, and that will be the radio organised. 5 weeks of programmes too – that takes us right up almost to the end of June. I need to forge ahead because I don’t know what the future might hold for me as yet. I briefly mentioned a while ago that there were a couple of things simmering away.

And that’s it. I’ve not set foot outside except to take the stats, and ask me if I care. The weather is miserable – it’s been 8 days since I’ve seen the sun and that’s quite depressing.

If I didn’t have so much to do around here, I’d have upped sticks and cleared off to the sunshine ages ago. Suffering from Cabin Fever in January is nothing new, but in early April it’s unthinkable.

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Wednesday 15th October 2014 – I WAS SOMEWHAT DISTRACTED …

…today and didn’t accomplish anything like what I intended to do.

It’s difficult to raise myself out of bed at the moment, particularly as it was another 04:00 night (or early morning) last night by the time that I had finished what I was doing. But after breakfast I made a start (or, rather, carried on) with some work that had been backing up for quite some time on the computer.

Rosemary rang me up during the afternoon – she wants to take a rain-check on our shopping trip as she has the roofers round. Her roof was badly damaged in that hailstorm last year and she’s had an emergency tarpaulin over it since then. The insurance company’s roofers have been executing their clients in strict rotation, and they’ve now appeared at Rosemary’s. Naturally, after all this time, she doesn’t want to slow them up now that they’ve finally arrived.

I stopped work at about 19:00 (yes, I was rather carried away by what I was doing) when the battery went flat again in the laptop (there’ no doubt that this little Acer Aspire notebook and its 5 or 6 hours of battery life was a magnificent purchase) to watch a DVD, but crashed out in the middle and I’ve no idea why because it wasn’t as if I had been doing anything exhausting.

I made one of my huge aubergine and kidney-bean casseroles for tea – and as usual there’s enough left over for another three meals and that saves me having to cook for the next few days, which is always a useful idea.

After tea, it was back on the laptop again to carry on all of this sorting out of files. I’m not sure where all of this will finish but so far I’ve liberated about 10GB of space on the hard drive and many of the files are much easier to find now. If I carry on like this, I shan’t know myself.

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Tuesday 6th December 2011 – I HAD TO WAIT …

…. until this afternoon to get the internet connection back and working, but now I’m up and running with my super-duper new laptop.

And it’s taking some getting used to, I’ll tell you. Especially this “85% – 10 hours 25 minutes – left” on the battery indicator.

There are downsides to it, of course. It’s fairly slow – a lot slower than I was expecting. But then, battery life and light weight was what was quite important to me and I certainly have that.

It took an age to upload everything that I needed – programs and the like from off the internet and the external DVD drive (which, much to my surprise, I found quite easily amongst the rubble). But I bet that I’ve forgotten something quite important.

And when I can lay my hands on a 2.5″ external caddy, I’ll take the hard drive out of the old laptop and copy the data over. It’s all there, complete and uncorrupted (I hope).

All of that has taken me most of the day and there has been little time to do much else. As you know, I’m leaving here for the UK in a day or two and I need the laptop set up for then.

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Monday 5th December 2011 – UP WITH THE COCK …

… this morning.

But that’s enough about my personal habits, isn’t it?

This morning I was awake bright and early (for me, anyway) and after a rushed breakfast Caliburn and I hit the road for Montlucon, the Auchan, and the new computer which I had mentioned yesterday.

Mind you, on the way to the Auchan I had another think.

I remember that it had always been my plan at one time to buy one of these small notebook computers for travelling – lightweight, extremely portable, and the battery lasts for hours.

Not much in the way of facilities, but back at home, have an external screen, DVD recorder, mouse and keyboard for when I’m working at my desk. And had I not had a similar emergency in the UK last time, that would have been exactly what I would have done as well.

Musing on this thought, I wandered around the informatique section of the Auchan where they had a the huge selection of notebooks. One thing that caught my eye was an Acer Aspire 1 – 500GB of hard drive and 4gb of RAM, on offer at just €299.

Further enquiries revealed that they were sold out and there was only the display model left. And if I would take that, they would do me 10% off. Do bears go to picnics in the woods?

So now I’m the owner of a new lightweight notebook and a new keyboard. And believe it or not, there’s a DVD reader somewhere around here. There’s also a flat-screen that works off 12-volt over there on the bench, a mouse and an external keyboard somewhere too.

So I returned back here ready to start to work on my new toy, and the blasted internet is down.

Now there’s a surprise!

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