Alobar Greywalker: Magickal Record (aka Frater PVN, LA-BAJ-AL)

01:42 pm July 1st, 2009




			Alobar Greywalker: Magickal Record (aka Frater PVN, LA-BAJ-AL) - More future shock Initiation/Quantum-unFoldment/Transmogrification/Megapolistomancy/Alchemy

alobar


	More future shock
	When I got my new laptop, there were surprises. Supposedly it has a built-in webcam. I was expecting a cam I could move around, but this is a teeny tiny hole in the front of the laptop lid atop the screen. Not very useful, but it was free. No parallel or serial ports. My parallel pot printer is dead. I was not planning to repair it, so no great loss. However my cable to upload glucometer data has a serial port. Now I gotta go looking to see if the glucometer folks ave a USB cable. I am not a real fan of the new wide screen monitors. To get the vertical page view I crave, I would need a 30" monitor. Maybe next year. In case of hurricane power failure, if I detach all USB add-ons, I can run for 6 hours with no external power. I have a emergency power supply which could not run my desktop with the massive 19" monitor. Maybe I can get another 12 hours from the external battery. The half-terabyte hard drive Is one of the things which drew me to this laptop, As well as the 4 gigs of memory (expandable to 8 gigs, if I need it). The VISTA OS is driving me nutso. I cannot locate the startup folder, or add programs to it. Rt-clicking the desktop does not let me access properties. The laptop has speakers, but I sure cannot figure out how to get any sounds out of them! Laptop goes into standby more when I close the lid. So I can't shut off the screen when doing long update installs. Must be a way to change this when I am not using my battery. Warranty Terms - Parts 1 year Warranty Terms - Labor 1 year Product Height 1.7" Product Width 15.4" Product Weight 5.9 lbs. Product Depth 11.3" Processor Brand Intel® Processor Intel® Core™2 Duo Mobile Processor Speed2.1GHz Display Type Widescreen display with 1440 x 900 resolution Screen Size 17" System Bus 800MHz Cache Memory2MB on die Level 2 System Memory (RAM) 4GB System Memory (RAM) Expandable To 8GB Type of Memory (RAM) DDR2 SDRAM Hard Drive Type Serial ATA (5400 rpm) Hard Drive Size 500GB Optical Drive DVD±RW/CD-RW Optical Drive Speeds Drive speeds not specified Direct-Disc Labeling No Digital Media Reader or Slots Yes, digital media card reader Graphics Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator Video Memory Up to 256MB GDDR3 (shared) Personal Video Recorder (PVR) Yes TV Tuner No MPEG Yes Built-in Webcam Yes Modem None Networking Built-in 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet network card Wireless Networking Wireless-A+G+N Bluetooth-Enabled No S-Video Outputs None Additional Audio/Video Connectors 1 HDMI Audio Intel® High Definition 2.0 Speakers Built-in PCMCIA Slots 1 ExpressCard/54 USB 2.0 Ports 5 IEEE 1394 FireWire Ports 1 Parallel Ports None Serial Ports None Game Ports None Laptop Weight Standard (more than 5.5 lbs.) Battery Type 9-cell lithium-ion Battery Life Not available Pointing Device Yes Operating System Platform Windows Operating System Windows Vista Home Premium with SP1 Included Software Adobe Reader 9, Microsoft Works and Roxio Creator 10 Dell Edition ENERGY STAR Qualified No HDMI Output Yes Blu-ray Player No

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	Comments

	From: lyoshka	Date: July 1st, 2009 06:59 pm (UTC)		(Link)

start => control panel => power options => on the right side click "choose what closing the lid does"

start => programs => startup (for startup folder, copy-paste shortcuts there)

there could be a sound button on your laptop or just click the speaker in the bottom left side of the screen (by the clock there)

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	From: alobar	Date: July 1st, 2009 07:58 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Thanks for the hints. I had messed with the start/programs menu. Switching it back makes navigation much easier.

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	From: sunfell	Date: July 2nd, 2009 12:39 am (UTC)		(Link)

Your sound icon might be hidden, too- to find it and put it in your taskbar, go to Start, control panel, sounds, and check the box that lets you see the volume control on your task bar.

Are you using your sidebar? I like mine. There are lots of cool gadgets there.

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	From: alobar	Date: July 2nd, 2009 01:46 am (UTC)		(Link)

I hate the sidebar. It covers icons I want to click. The clock is nice, but when I re-boot after taking it off the sidebar & place it where I want it, the clock evaporates.

I have my sound set to maximum. With winamp also set to maximum, I can listen to shoutcast radio, but volume is very low.

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	From: sunfell	Date: July 2nd, 2009 01:50 am (UTC)		(Link)

Laptop speakers are notoriously lousy. I recommend popping for a set of external speakers. Even the cheap ones sound pretty good.

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	From: alobar	Date: July 2nd, 2009 01:57 am (UTC)		(Link)

I have speakers in my secondary monitor. Better sound quality but no better volume. Monitor volume also set to max.

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	From: sunfell	Date: July 2nd, 2009 02:06 am (UTC)		(Link)

Thing with sound is that there are multiple volumes to adjust- depending on the source. If you go into Control Panel and find "Sound", you will find the master volume control. Mess around with that, and make sure nothing is muted.

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	From: alobar	Date: July 2nd, 2009 02:15 am (UTC)		(Link)

I played around with that earlier.

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	From: alobar	Date: July 2nd, 2009 07:35 am (UTC)		(Link)

When I set closing the lid to "do nothing", things get very strange.

All open windows on my laptop monitor move over to my secondary monitor. Then when I open the lid, all windows on secondary monitor (including windows which are supposed to be on the secondary monitor) all move to laptop monitor.

Any way around this annoying quirk?

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	From: adayinthelife	Date: July 1st, 2009 09:39 pm (UTC)		(Link)

you know, you might save yourself a lot of hassle switching back to XP

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	From: alobar	Date: July 1st, 2009 11:21 pm (UTC)		(Link)

It is always a pain in the ass to upgrade software or operating system. I may have to buy a book to help me customize it.

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	From: alobar	Date: July 2nd, 2009 07:38 am (UTC)		(Link)

My copy of XP is an upgrade. It won't install unless I have my Win98 disk. Win98 disk has been missing for years.

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	From: sunfell	Date: July 2nd, 2009 12:34 am (UTC)		(Link)

Hey- welcome back! I have Vista, and while it takes a bit of getting used to, I really like it. Feel free to pick my brain if you need to do so.

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	From: alobar	Date: July 2nd, 2009 03:06 am (UTC)		(Link)

I have been driving myself nuts attempting to install a font. I drag the TTF file into the font folder, but the font never shows up.

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From: khidir	Date: July 2nd, 2009 01:37 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Welcome back Alobar :)

You may have a free upgrade option to Windows 7? (otherwise beta is free 'till March) It's way faster than Vista or XP. You may want to consider that at some point, Vista is a resource hog of note.

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	From: lord_caramac	Date: July 2nd, 2009 08:39 pm (UTC)		(Link)

I hate Vista. I bloody hate it. That's why when I got my new PC with Vista pre-installed, I just deleted it and installed Linux instead. Plus a small partition with XP for gaming.

And there are USB-to-RS232 and USB-to-parallel adapter cables, so you can still use old parallel printers and devices with serial RS232 interfaces with USB. I haven't had any computers with anything but USB connectors in ages, and I'm still using a parallel laser printer on one of my machines, and several RS232 devices, without any problems at all.

Even all my keyboards and mice are USB now, no more PS/2 connectors on my machines, just a bunch of USB 2.0 sockets - 12 of them on my main machine.

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