Ever have one of those days when you want to heft your computer up and toss it out a window? Yeah, that's me. Granted it's a thin IBM Thinkpad laptop so it wouldn't take much to heft it.
I got it on Ebay earlier this year just to have something portable that I can take around due to my nomadic lifestyle. I just needed something to watch movies on, write papers for school and get on the net. Well, I landed a working PIII 700Mhz Thinkpad for the wealthy sum of $200. That being said, the HD has crapped out on me (I was gonna upgrade from a 4 gig drive at some point anyway, though), it has next to no memory (128mb will do ya in the year 2000, but not now) and no burner, not even a floppy drive.
So, I buy an external DVD burner at Fry's for about $100. I'm thinking "Sweet. Now I can start backing stuff up!" Nope.
I can read CDs, watch movies and listen to music CDs, but putting blank media in (D VD+R, DVD-R, CD-R doesn't matter) of several different brand names yields the frustrating prompt of "No disc is in drive F:" Not even the burning guru known as Roxio will recognize anything.
So, looks like I'm off to Fry's (or Best Buy or wherever) AGAIN to track down some PC100 SO-DIMM ram. Turns out the burner requires 256Mb of ram, so MAYBE that will solve the problem. If not, I need the memory anyway.....
Oh, and my student pulled the red handle instead of the black handle today. This causes that big spinning fan in front to....well....STOP. Luckily I caught his bonehead maneuver and shoved it right back in so the engine was still getting fuel. Only 555 more hours of this, but who's counting?
I got it on Ebay earlier this year just to have something portable that I can take around due to my nomadic lifestyle. I just needed something to watch movies on, write papers for school and get on the net. Well, I landed a working PIII 700Mhz Thinkpad for the wealthy sum of $200. That being said, the HD has crapped out on me (I was gonna upgrade from a 4 gig drive at some point anyway, though), it has next to no memory (128mb will do ya in the year 2000, but not now) and no burner, not even a floppy drive.
So, I buy an external DVD burner at Fry's for about $100. I'm thinking "Sweet. Now I can start backing stuff up!" Nope.
I can read CDs, watch movies and listen to music CDs, but putting blank media in (D VD+R, DVD-R, CD-R doesn't matter) of several different brand names yields the frustrating prompt of "No disc is in drive F:" Not even the burning guru known as Roxio will recognize anything.
So, looks like I'm off to Fry's (or Best Buy or wherever) AGAIN to track down some PC100 SO-DIMM ram. Turns out the burner requires 256Mb of ram, so MAYBE that will solve the problem. If not, I need the memory anyway.....
Oh, and my student pulled the red handle instead of the black handle today. This causes that big spinning fan in front to....well....STOP. Luckily I caught his bonehead maneuver and shoved it right back in so the engine was still getting fuel. Only 555 more hours of this, but who's counting?