Libretto update.......

Well, it wouldn't be me if something wasn't going to go wrong somewhere.
Today I seemed to spend all day battling with the bloody Libretto.

Last night I posted about how wonderful the Libretto was, today I hit the snags.
The main problem being the difficulty of getting anything off the damn thing.

It's only outputs are an infra red port and a PC card slot.
It comes bundled with a PC card external Floppy Disk Drive (FDD) and my original plan was to use this to transfer documents across from the Lib to my main PC.
Then, at some point I was going to look into getting a PC card with USB port or SD card attachment. That would mean I'd be able to put bigger programs on the thing.

But I didn't get chance to test the FDD out last night because we don't have a spare floppy disk at home. Because in these days of usb sticks with more memory than the computer I'm typing this on, frankly the idea of using something with a maximum capacity of 1.44Mb is a little stupid. So it had to wait till today at school to test it out.

And of course, it didn't bloody work did it?
Stress, stress, stress. As far as I could work out it was all meant to work right out of the box dammit. But as soon as I put the PC card in the Lib started asking for drivers for the FDD.
And it soon dawned on me that this could well mean that the whole thing was useless.
After all, it would be fairly easy to get drivers off the interweb thingy for the FDD, but how the hell do you put them onto the Lib, seeing as you'd install the FDD drivers onto the Lib using the FDD which doesn't work because the drivers aren't already on the machine.
And even worse than that, anything else I wanted to put on the Lib was going to install it's drivers via the bloody FDD as well. Arse. No USB, no network connection. Arse, Arse, Arse.

Much scratching of head and cursing. (Under the breath cursing of course, no swearing in front of the children).

And about two hours later, after lots of Googling, I was still no further on. Bollocks.
I had the drivers all ready to go, but still no idea of how to get them onto the machine.

I even took at trip to both computer shops in Pocklington (amazingly we have two in a town so small) but they had no ideas either.
Then, after a break to pick up Molly and get her hair cut, I had that blinding flash of “what if I try doing it through DOS”?
Remember DOS?

I always ignored it to be honest and have never used it, but I made a DOS boot disk and tried it to check that the FDD was definitely knackered.
Miracle of miracles it worked.
Now, how the hell do I get the drivers onto windows?
After a little bit of Google instruction in DOS 101, I had the copy command sorted and the drivers went on first time.

Which means the world is now a good place again.

I have a tiny laptop, I can write stuff on it, I can save and copy to my computer using the floppy disk. But more than that, I can look at getting a PC card to drive a USB stick and getting more stuff put onto it.
Happy me, happy me.

I think I've found the perfect combination of function and size. And the fact it still looks like how we always thought computers should look like in the future is a bonus as well.
It may be nearly 10 years old, but aside from the very grey box colouring, it still looks very cutting edge if you ask me.
In fact the people at both computer shops were quite amazed at how lovely it was yet how old it was.