Disaster in the PC department!

The more regular of my readers will have noticed that I missed the 'Day 002' entry yesterday. It wasn't down to the lack of a signal or even bad timing on my part, rather a major laptop disaster!! My laptop was about 5 years old and with the increasing amount of digital media, (images, video and MP3's,) that I was using, having to perform a rebuild was becoming a regular hobby. Yesterday it happened again only this time it was more terminal! A re-installation of XP didn't fix it, neither did a format and clean re-installation - this only threw up many worrying error messages. An eventual partial successfull rebuild left me with no USB drivers, no wireless connectivity, no software and consequently no internet to fix the problems! It was time to bite the bullet. Today I arrived in Banbury town center at around 4.00pm - just enough time for a short bus ride to the retail park and a visit to various computer outlets! I returned home with this:

A Toshiba Equium A300! Nice machine and a good price but with the downside of running Vista! The look and feel is great but I'm even having trouble installing a compatible version of Flash to view my main site. Now begins the task of finding compatible versions of Kaspersky, Brother printer drivers, Tiscali broadband to mention but a few!

Cruising down today, I realised just how pretty the South Oxford is:

Apart, that is, from the tell tale signs of BW selling off all it's lockside properties!

A tight squeeze through Cropredy where I passed the Mikron theatre company on tour towards Fenny Compton for an evening performance.

And then on towards my evenings mooring here.

Tomorrow, through Banbury towards Aynho and nearer the Thames all the time; with the added encouragement of an extremely hot weather forecast!