Quietly optimistic

Had a lousy night's sleep last night, for one reason and another, so I decided to have a lie-in this morning. Just before ten, I was awoken, to my annoyance, by the irritating little tune my mobile plays whenever a text message comes through. When I checked it, I was pleasantly surprised to see I had a text from Acer, telling me my laptop was fixed and on its way home. So I'm quietly optimistic that all will be okay with it. I checked the tracking reference they me via DHL's online tracker, and it apparently left DHL's Plymouth depot at 15.23 today. Pretty good considering DHL only collected it from me at lunchtime on Friday. So had those muppets collected the day they were supposed to, it would have probably arrived home in time for the weekend.

Much to my amazement, after disabling a few unnecessary Windows services, my desktop PC now boots within about two and a half minutes, instead of 20-25. Most people would still find this unacceptably slow. Considering it's at least six years old now, has a piddly Duron 750 processor, and just 256 MB of RAM, I can live with that. It did go a bit squiffy earlier. I don't usually hook the cable modem up to the USB port until the firewall has kicked in. Today, the PC decided it didn't like me doing that. Worse still, it refused to boot up after a restart, and would only do so after a hard reboot. Don't really like going online, even for a few seconds without a firewall. My firewall, Zone Alarm, refused to start yesterday, and I didn't realise for about five minutes. After rebooting and getting everything running again, I found a lovely Trojan waiting for me. Oh well, hopefully by tomorrow, Thursday at the latest, I can send this hateful machine back into retirement again.

I just hope DHL don't keep me waiting all day. With the threat of snow looming, I need to go out and stock up on essential supplies.