At Home with John and Debbie

Mum and Dad were having some problems with their new desktop PC. We arranged an evening for me to talk Dad through them on the phone, and as the evening approached I grew more and more apprehensive at the prospect of administrating Windows Vista (with which I am not really familiar) by proxy, with my mouth, a phone line, my Dad’s ears, brain, eyes and fingers adding noise to the signal. So instead, I decided to take myself to the problem, and arranged to visit them to coincide with a weekend examiners’ meeting Debbie had to attend in Cambridge.

I took Friday afternoon off work, and had a pleasant and trouble free train journey. By teatime I’d found Vista drivers for their printer, and installed them successfully (Vista allows you to install older drivers, but they don’t work!).

We went to see The Lives of Others at the Arts Centre cinema. Perhaps I’ll review it in another post. Perhaps I won’t…

On Saturday morning I wrestled with Windows networking - hampered by not one but two personal firewalls (their Packard Bell computer came with both the standard Windows firewall and Symantec Desktop Firewall), to allow them to print from their laptop downstairs, and use the desktop’s disk drive from downstairs.

While I did this, Dad was guiding visitors to “his” nature reserve in Nanteos, as part of a Ceredigion Wildlife Trust open day. Mum took me there later on, where we saw some trained hawks awaiting their display that afternoon, a woodturning lathe powered by a whippy branch, some honey, various friends of Mum and Dad, and the nature reserve.

Mum took me for lunch at Tides restaurant on Aberystwyth prom. We had sandwiches, which were nice.

Before going home to watch the FA Cup final, we had a peek in the museum, where there is a temporary exhibition entitled “B.C.: Before Computers”. This included various mechanical devices for doing what computers do now: tabulators, file retrieval systems, copiers, typewriters etc. — all very interesting.

Later on, I moved Mum and Dad’s iTunes library onto their desktop, and configured iTunes to share, and configured their laptop’s iTunes to use the shared library… and I put their old hard disk in the desktop… and I coached Mum and Dad both in the use of iTunes and iPod synchronisation. Let’s hope it sticks this time!

Then for good measure, I found a multiregion hack for their DVD player and performed it, because their French teacher has started lending them DVDs they couldn’t watch.

Early on Sunday, Mum dropped me off at Borth station, and despite the rail system’s best efforts, I was home in time to share lunch with Debbie.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 14:26 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.