This and that

My diet last fall was a blazing disaster. It was clear that I couldn't control my intake well enough to lose weight the way you gain it quickest...
So I've broken down and bought an E900 Horizon elliptical trainer.
I also bought a new tv - first in 6 years- a 42-inch LCD Phillips that I've hung on the wall. The plan is to watch movies/tv/netflix while exercising.

I tried connecting my old laptop to the tv, but kept getting the blue screen of death. I had bought a new (old style) video card for the laptop docking station that had an DVI port and not just an VGA port. I was able to only find a DVI-to-HDMI adapter cable; not VGA-to-HDMI. There was S-video connection possibilities too, but I really didn't catch on to that, and the fact I would have had such a cable, until too late. I then tried my new laptop that comes with an DVI port, but after I log onto windows it seazed showing stuff on the tv.

The I hauled my desktop over and it's working like charm. Already managed to watch a movie through it too from netflix-online: "A Simple Curve".
I didn't get the sounds to work adequately, though, so I hauled over my DJ equipment and plugged in the 300 Watt amp and 2 foot tall speakers. No remote but at least it sounds good.

I then decided to move the old laptop back and make that the new HUB for printers and peripherals - in the midst of installing drivers for them and stuff, I tried re-installing the docking station drivers, as the VGA port in the back of the docking station that I had plugged in the old LCD monitor didn't seem to work....
WHABAMM.. fucked Windows irrecoverably.. I'm now reinstalling Win XP from scratch after having formatted the hard drive. In a way, that gives me a fresh start on a very software-plagued computer, but I feel I may have permanentally lost pictures, files, drawings that I may not have had backed up last year when I was moving them to my new laptop... oh well...

At one point I also plugged in my old Pentium II desktop that's been collecting dust for the last 6 years, hoping to find that it might be strong enough to double as a server/hub, but to no avail. I need to take it to the dump along with an even older 386DX/16 I've got in the basement... I guess I'm a tech-packrat.

Let's hope that I don't have to redo everything I'm doing now when I go try to re-install the docking station drivers after XP finishes.. it shouldn't, though. Maybe this fresh install will let my network to work as intended - it never has. The old laptop was always able to access the other two computers, but to the other two it was as good as not there. Probably had somethign to do with the fact that the ethernet connected to the docking station and not to the laptop directly. Essentially I always had two LAN ports of which one didn't "work", as per Win.

Ok.. it's starting the XP up now.. ta ta!