Two Laps Talking

Two Laps Talking

Scenario: One old laptop and One middle aged laptop.

Old Laptop has got lots of information. But hasn’t got all the things that can bring all that information into the next generation. I.e. it has no CD burner, no modem, no usb port, its printer port lost its teeth somewhere in the early 2000s and its only portable disk is floppy.

So I bought a null modem to connect old laptop to middle aged laptop. Duh... too hard, and the pins are missing in the printer port.

Then an inner light told me...what is this little window here. It’s an infrared! How it’s like suddenly discovering the old laptop has psychic powers. The middle aged laptop also has an infrared. It’s working fine and waiting to receive...it’s waiting, still waiting...

Old laptop can’t fire up its psychic powers. Too much cigarettes and alcohol...  Then I realised I never initiated the darn thing in the first place. It’s like waiting for years and years to reach puberty only to be denied it because parents never thought there is something called teenage years, so you go through life wearing kids clothes to the dying day. And then, ah ha... on your deathbed you discover you had those hormones... a little too late now...

Hope springs eternal... (or something like that)

I couldn’t activate it because it never had the infrared icon or whatever it needed on its control panel. So I googled through and discovered there is something called a windows driver for infrared devices...it’s at microsoft.com... and the file is something called Win95ir... downloaded it onto a floppy and fed it to the old lap.

Now it has the works...an infrared icon, a monitor, nice lights and a dialogue box telling me it can’t establish connection even when middle aged lap is waiting and shining its light!  

to be continued    

Update: 12 October 2005

Unfortunately I’ve pushed and shoved and now Old Lap is in the intensive care unit.  I’ve messed with the registry and I can’t restore Windows because the OEM CD I was given didn’t have a setup.exe file!  I’ve been ripped off but too late. The company that sold me the laptop folded about 2 years ago!

Forget IR technology. Let me take a stroll down DOS and see what can be done.

to be continued
update 20 october

taking a stroll down DOS is not as easy as I thought it would be: so much to learn, so much to do. Here are some useful websites for future reference

bootdisk.com

digressed; lots of interesting DOS games

dos commands

lots of MSDos software

dos drivers for reading and editing NTFS files  

list of MSDos commands

dos links – not comprehensive but they’ll lead you somewhere