[Bill Murray]

Hal, from Stanley Kubrick's Space 2001 has now become my constant companion.

Last night, I posted a hellish long bit starting with "TAA TAA TAAA" my new cellar computer station is up and running.

Not..... just as I was about to send the reply my brandy new internet connector started flashing and I lost the whole thing, message, internet connection, everything.

Got on the phone to my DSL provider and learned a few things I did not want to learn. #1, what I got was merely another DSL "box/modem". As I have the DSL service to one phone number, I can only access the internet on one computer at a time which is hooked up to the same "box". I now have one box upstairs and one in the cellar.

So, I checked the upstairs office PC and it was offline. Took me an hour to remember I have a laptop still hooked up to that part of my wireless network which still functions. Went up to the back porch area where I have the laptop sitting and discovered...what?
We had my three grandchildren and a couple of their friends to the house to swim in our pool. One of them got on the laptop to access their own provider and failed to log off.

Got that gone and thought I was Good to Go.

Not.... Another phone call gave me more good news. The DSL modems that I have are for lack of a better term, "live" all the time. In other words, I have to physically disconnect the phone line from one or the other of my PCs to allow the one I want to use to connect to the Internet. I now have that procedure down so to say.

Next, fire up the printer in the cellar. Not....... Windows XP does not in any way recognize my two year old laser printer. And, of course, I have probably 20 installation discs in my upstairs office for hardware I have installed over the last 5 years or so butnot the one for the printer I have chosen. Tried to download the driver from the Brother site and it would not work.

I am not in the mood right now to try out the scanner even though it is the same brand as my PC.

Just for fun, here are the specs of what I have in this marvelous but non functioning environment.

PC: HP pavilion a450n
3.00GHZ Pentium Processor
512 MB SDRAM Memory
160GB hard drive
Out of time here but also apparently a fairly good CD/DVD writer and my employees tell me a "killer" graphics card.

I know little about such things.

The scanner is an HP Scan Jet 4670 which is a portable thingie and very easy to use. Hope to hook it up Sat/Sun. The printer I am trying to use is a Brother MFC 8500 which worked well in the store.

Sorry I did not really get into the original subject but we have been away from the store for 10 days and we are buried in work.

I will comment further on the subject of how we can share lots of information and not use up all of GWB's bandwidth.
Bill



Aha says I, now I can get the cellar unit in operation again.