Disjointed observation

A week ago I went to turn my computer on and lights flash then... nothing. Not a squeak.

So now instead of a nearly 10 year old w98 box I have a shiny new laptop with winXP (not touching Vista with a barge pole until it settles down some more!). It's amazing how much faster everything is when the limiting factor is the broadband and not the computer. Local fix-it shop diagnosed motherboard failure and put some of the stuff from the hard drive onto disk for me but weren't exactly over helpful so R bought an external box for the old hard drive so we have been able to recover all the data we wanted not just what the computer shop interpreted my instructions to be.

I also have a shiny new portable multi-region DVD player so T can watch without taking up my screen (previously he would watch such things as Thomas the Tank Enging or Pingu or The Wombles (yes really, he's totally fascinated by the original 1970s Wombles) on my computer if I needed to do anything on the computer when he was around). I was surprised at just how difficult it was to get a multi-region player at a sensible price.

So on Wednesday evening I was cheerfully reading a board and went to move to the next page and my mouse won't move the pointer. Scroll wheel still working, buttons working but no movement.

Have had to revert to the old mouse - which doesn't have a scroll wheel! Aaaargh.

We must do some sorting out of computers. We currently have set up and running a DR-Dos box and this W98 box. In the study there is what ought to be a linux box but we've never managed to get it running properly. Under the desk in here there is another windows box we were given - we've never even set it up enough to discover which version of windoze it has! But something will have to happen as I'm about to have to use a web-based database which requires a minimum of W2000 (and doesn't even promise to work for Macs).

Which reminds me I must sort out something about T's webpage which we broke the first time we tried to update it and so has had the same "place-holding" photo up for over 18 months. (Has anyone any recommendations for writing a webpage?)