This is the first time in about four years (okay, three and a half) that I’ve actually had internet in my room for good. After a whole week of this, it is time to evaluate!
Generally, it’s been positive only. Despite being brand new, my pc had an occasional software-induced glitch. Without internet, it would’ve been impossible for me to locate and eradicate the problem, and I may have returned the pc to the shop to give it a proper look through. Luckily, that wasn’t necessary. Though I was half fearing the problem was caused by faulty hardware, a quick search of Microsoft’s online help features revealed it was actually a Vista bug loads of people suffer from (WMI error 10) which was essentially not a problem, except poor programming causes inexplicable freeze-ups leaving a hard reboot the only option open to the user. What this error – solved by running a simple script – is still doing in retail versions of Vista approximately two years after release can only be a complete and utter mystery to me, but I’m glad that problem is over. Weirdly enough, the freezes only happened when I tried to open notepad. Not a terribly demanding task considering all the other things I’m forcing it to do. But such is Vista!
It also didn’t really interfer with my study work. I managed to plough through the approx 80 pages due for paleography in an hour or two, three, without much pc distraction. We read up to and including the Carolingian minuscule last week, which was quite interesting. The early national alphabets were awkward in the extreme, including a’s that looked like u’s or double c’s (cc), and weirdest of all, the Visigothic t that looked a bit like ct. Ah yes, the wonders of the alphabet. Also, I found out that one Latin student apparently didn’t know enough Latin to understand the transcriptions. So what are they doing over there?!
