New Laptop

This will be the first blog post I have written using my new laptop and I will say this from the off, I am very happy with it! I could pretend it was a hard decision to finally decide to take the plunge and splash the cash if you will excuse my overuse of metaphors but in reality it is something I've been thinking about doing for a long long time and so it came very easily.

Another amazing thing about the whole thing is that the Windows Easy Transfer software that comes bundles with Windows 7 actually worked pretty well. I'm sure it took a bit longer than it would have done if I'd have done it myself but when I can be getting on with something else, I don't really mind. One problem it has thrown up is for some of the settings that it has transferred. On the plus side, many of the customisations that I've made to my desktop have been copied over but in some cases, this has proven to be more of a hindrance than a help. Case in point is Windows Live Messenger, something I use all the time and it has been refusing to sign in at times. For some unknown reason, it would sign me out of the service and refuse to let me in, stating that it was unable to sign me in because the service was unavailable. It also kicked me out of iSketch - something I will talk about later but which seems wholly unrelated. I decided that the problem must be down to the settings that had been transferred and them being incompatible with my current set up. After deleting the associated settings and registry entries, it so far seems to be working as it should do. It seems strange that of all the programs I've been using, it would be Microsoft's own products that are causing the most problems and I have to run WLM in Vista compatibility mode on my desktop because it doesn't work as it should do. You'd have thought that they would test these things before releasing them or at least (especially by now) have released a patch to fix it.

As I mentioned earler, I have become addicted to an online Pictionary themed game called iSketch. As with Pictionary, it gives you a word and other people have to guess what it is. A maximum of ten people can play in one room at a time and there is a chat room element as well. The benifit of playing online of course is that you can play over long distances and with people you have never met but as you have a paint style drawing board, you can draw shapes and use different colours and brush thicknesses without having to go to an art centre before hand. It is a perfect source of procrastination and you can play for a few minutes or a few hours without getting too bored. You can even set up private rooms so that you can play against mates only and select the difficulty level and time limits. I have surprised myself with how well I have managed to do so far - not only as a guesser but as a drawer as well, something I am notoriously bad at. A couple of the hardest words have been avocado and windscreen, the latter because I read the prompt incorrectly and started drawing a WIDESCREEN TV. Thankfully I noticed my mistake in time and I was forgiven at the end but it was highly embarrassing when I noticed my mistake.