I'm still in a bit of a sulk with my Garmin as I live on a tree lined road, so even though I can get my gps signal from the middle of my lawn, by the time I have gone through the back gate to start my run I lose the signal until I am about half a mile into the run, it will be slightly improved when all the leaves have fallen...
Andy, do tell us more about your laptop, I have a soft spot for gadgets, spent the first hour this morning teaching the principal of the college I work for how to use his ipaq - he got quite enthusiastic too ;-) - Saturday afternoon was spent building my son's new pc, he is doing a music tech, course, so this is rather a beast of a machine. According to my kids I don't quite fit the stereotype of middle aged mum, but that would be boring wouldn't it?
Incidentally Andy, Chavs are called Scallies locally.
Except that it's even better than that. The one they gave me has 1GB of RAM, a built-in webcam and Bluetooth-enabled.
I must investigate what to do with the webcam. Perhaps I could stream sweaty pictures of me, mouthing "I've just been for a run". Hmm. Maybe not.
The machine is fab, almost perfect. The one serious complaint is the battery life which is, frankly, very poor. About an hour. I'm hoping (rather desperately) that a few charges may extend this a bit, but unlikely. A lesser complaint is that the fan's a little noisy, giving off a high-pitched whine at regular intervals. I keep thinking Emlyn Hughes is on the radio.
Then a couple of small things: the CMOS battery is dead or dying, meaning that I have to reset the date each time I start it up (they were very apologetic and are sending me a new one). And the keyboard layout's a little unusual. Instead of the Ctrl key at the bottom left, it's one in from there, with an Fn key there instead (for activating certain function keys). I use the Ctrl key a lot - for saving docs and copying/pasting, so I keep missing it and hitting the Fn key instead. And the Home/End/PgUp/PgDn keys are positioned vertically down the extreme right instead of where I'm used to them: along the top right. I use them a lot too, so I keep having to think where I'm putting me fingers. But I'll get used to that.
Scallies, ah yes. A good old-fashioned Merseyside word. I suppose it does mean pretty much the same, though I think scally may just have an almost affectionate dimension to it? A bit like "rascal" which I suppose may well be the origin of scally? I might be wrong. "Chav" is definitely a derogatory label.
Cheers
Andy
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Oh no!!!! We've hijacked SP's thread! He'll go mad when he comes home and finds out!! What are we gonna do? Oh no!!!!!
El Gordo
Great things are done when men and mountains meet.
I'm sure, specially as he can pick up the info he needs now...
1 hour battery life - that is diabolical, have you checked with the maufacturers spec - sounds a bit iffy to me. Nuisance about the ctrl key, i'd really miss that, it is in the conventional place on my rather elderly Tosh. CMOS battery will be fine when you've swopped it out.
Enjoy!
ps
Built in webcam gave me visions of American Pie - tee hee :-)
Try SpeedSwitch XP if it's an XP laptop - this does the function of the old Intel SpeedStep softare (which doesn't work under XP). Helps my battery last longer.
