Most people don't post things that embarrass them but I don't care, it shows I'm human :-)

Yesterday I'm on my laptop playing about with Linux when the laptop just dies on me. I click the "on" button and the green light flashed for a second and then the computer stopped again.

I try a few things but nothing worked so I undid all the screws at the back and checked to make sure nothing had burned out. Couldn't find a thing. So 15 minutes later I'm still sweating about it so I look down and notice that the power supply didn't have a green light on. Great I thought, power supply blew. My eyes then slowly moved along the cable to the plug socket and it's there I notice that I hadn't turned on the power when first opened the shop :-)

Now to be fair to me Windoze does show how much battery power I have left and warns me when I'm low whereas Linux doesn't show anything or give any warning.

See, even the experts get caught out on basic checks sometimes :-)

After a week of hassle in windows I started to remember the pretty much hassle free time I had with Linux. I've installed numerous versions before but I never felt quit comfortable with them. Well I was surfing around the other day and I noticed Mandrake has been upgraded from 9 to 10. Out of all the other distro's I used before I did like Mandrake the most so I downloaded the new version and thought I'd give it a go.

I hunted through a few newsgroups to see what was new and I was keen to see if any viruses had been discovered for linux yet. I read one site where if you kept the distro updated it's something like the following:

Windows viruses:50,000+
Linux viruses: 0

Even if you never bothered updating the OS you're only likely to encounter 2 or 3 viruses and none of them wide spread or major. What's funny is I read somewhere else that there are indeed virus checkers for Linux but until an actual virus comes along that's wide spread and disruptive they don't see the point trying to sell them yet. Heh, keep on waiting folks, could be a long time :-)

For peace of mind I was glad to see Linux was still the rock solid and secure platform I loved.

First off I wanted to see how well it coped with winXP which was already on my machine. I had already partitioned the drive in windows and had some files on it. I decided to leave everything alone and watch what it did.

The install process was a a lot easier than I remember from last time. It knew I had XP on the machine and knew it had a 2nd partition. All I had to do was click on the D drive and choose how I wanted to set it up. A novice would have no problems installing the new Distro.

Setting up the duel boot was easy and I don't think they could possibly make installing it any easier.

I chose the KDE desktop because I like the way it looks and this also has undergone some really nice changes. It was good to see that MD 10 only installs minimal programmes this time around because last time I left everything default I had gigs and gigs worth of junk because it installed half a dozen of the same kind of programmes.

KDE is looking more user friendly than before and if you're worried about installing it and losing the feel for windows don't panic because if you understand windows you'll understand KDE well enough. You can even have the same startup look as windoze plus a desktop closely resembling it.

I'll be reviewing it more shortly but if you want to see what I'm going on about check out: The Mandrake Website

Well I found out what the rattle on my car was. It wasn't the door as I first thought because it was doing it last night when I took my dog out.

Last night I was under the car for 20 minutes knocking everything to see if I could find it and in the end I gave up. this morning I took it back to the garage and I told them how concerned I was and can they come out with me for a quick drive to hear the noise. Craig (the owner) just walks up to my car and yes "ahh yes, that’s the problem". I looked at him puzzled wondering how he can tell what the noise was without even looking under the car. He taps a metal plate that goes over the nuts for the tires and sure enough there is the noise I've been dreading.

Someone had tried to get the plate off and left it loose. I've never had a car which has had a plate before so never even looked at the tires.

So I feel still really stupid :-)

The Tide Times for this weekend have been updated. I had done it last week but somehow an older version got uploaded.

Last Friday I went to Dawlish for a computer repair job and all the way there and back I could here a rattle coming from the passenger side of the car. It sounded so bad I even took it to Kwik Fit for them to have a look at it. I just bought the car so I was quite worried. They couldn't find anything wrong so they took it for a test drive but couldn't find the fault when they got back.

The other night me and friend went to get something to eat and there was no rattle. Last night I took my dog for a walk and again no rattle. I have a really bad feeling the rattle was the passenger door wasn't shut properly when I bought it because since my friend had opened and closed the door no more rattle. I'm going to feel soooooo stupid if that was the problem :-)

The computer attacks having been going on all weekend but I've now upgraded the security on the firewall and so far no attack has got through to any other machine. I've also installed the Browser Opera on the machines to also help prevent this latest and very serious threat