Plan B

I hate being beaten and very rarely give up on technical problems with my computers.

Finally, I managed to install the software to connect a Vodafone dongle to my netbook. Tantalisingly, there was the icon in the Connect section of the desktop on my Acer Inspire One. All I had to do was plug the dongle in and click on the icon and by magic I would be connected to the 3g network.

Nope - that did not work. Nor did going to the terminal program and typing in the command line that should have brought the program to life.

So the best laid plans as they say have not born fruit as yet. But I have a plan B.

Pam really needs to get into the world of the Internet. She constantly reminds me that she would have no idea how to even start up my desktop machine let alone access our Internet banking. So, out of sheer generosity, I have decided that Pam can use my netbook for this purpose. She likes the netbook and finds it less daunting than my desktop. The interface is simple - just two programs that Pam will use; Mail and Browser. There will be no issues about viruses or Windows updates for Pam to worry about, it will be Internet nirvana.

The rub is that I will need to configure the machine for Pam to use by wiping out all the bookmarks that are not relevant and configuring the email program with her email address. That means that the netbook will no longer be set up for me to use. That is where Plan B comes in.

I can solve all of my issues with this netbook at a stroke by ordering a Samsung NC 10 with Windows XP upgrading it to 2Gb of RAM. Not only should the Vodafone dongle work but all the tasks I now use the netbook for like photo editing will be a lot easier to perform. Linux is great but Windows is more familiar.

It all makes perfect sense to me - now to convince Pam.