09/15/07 Early Check in September 15, 2007 Eastern

[2canadianfans]

Tom..thanks for the computer help. Will try tomorrow.. sharon

 

[captaincrash]

Hi Everyone -

Just checking in!!! I have been busy trying to figure out how to digital scrapbook and have come to the realization that I need more memory on my laptop so I have been busy figuring out what RAM I need and how to install it. I ordered it from Best Buy but will have to wait till Sunday to pick it up since I live in a rural area and have no stores near me...

Congrats on Ryan's walking!!!! My son Rob just started walking the past few weeks also (although he is 17 months old...a VERY late walker)

Ya kno...

... it might ALSO be a function of how corrupted your HD is or how much open space is left on your HARD DRIVE too. I have found that on my notebook computer my speed issues were all related to these considerations. A lot of applications are huge and the performance limits from memory or processor have been (apparently) a non-issue for me. Now if you know your applications are elegant, powerful and HUGE then maybe memory or processor speed might be an issue. Or maybe - my opinion is meaningless (highly probable too!).

Either way... as I understand it you HD runs optimally with a minimum of 1/3rd of it empty. That is in part because it uses some of the space to swap data as virtual memory - plus when they quote rotation speed and access rates, as well as reading and writing speeds - this is a REAL speed limiter compared to the lightening fast processing speeds of memory and the processor. IE, the hard drive is PHYSICAL and the data reading and writing, as well as the ACCESS speed (related to palatter speed supposedly) emerge as considerations on performance.

Now - if you had a slower processor = then you also might have mismatched data bus archetecture... thus creating another bottle neck - but usually this is not an issue except with the most powerful of applications. Powerful applications are often elegant graphics intensive GAMES... not drafting applications.

SO... to check your hard drive usage... move your pointer to the start button at the bottom left and left click. Normally a universal option on the upper right column is the "MY COMPUTER" option... select it. Now... if you have ONE hard drive in your system then it typically is the "C" drive and will appear in a seperate area with a tiny icon of a drive. Now go ahead and RIGHT click on it and select PROPERTIES. A tabbed window should pop up and a pie chart should accompany the GENERAL tab. The pie chart will show how much of your drive is used and free. NOw... if less than 25% of your drive is free you may have found your speed problem....

If this is the case you need to clear off a lot of junk or underused applications. I recently bought my 2nd external hard drive for my excess data. I got a 250 gigabyte drive for only $89 after rebate. Oh... you should be very careful about transferring stuff around unless you know what you are doing. Get my drift?

ANd if your drive is not overloaded - then it might be severely corrupted or fragmented. You need to run a defragging application. Oh.... if your computer gets lots of use and has never been defragged then this might be the cause of a slow system.

 

[Mommaraven]

Good morning! Just checking in. Patrick is going to Richmond this afternoon to take a licensing exam for work tomorrow. I'm sure he'll do fine, but I think he's a bit nervous about it. He's been studying for weeks. Can we send some good juju his way?

Tonight my sister is staying over so I can help her work on her college applications. She's been putting off for too long - and driving my mother insane - so I finally put my foot down and told her that we are just going to do it. I can think of better ways to spend my free night (DS4 will be at his dad's), but I'm too much of a Mom, even with my siblings. I think I'll be taking myself to see "Marie Antoinette" tomorrow since I want to see it but don't want to subject Patrick to it. I'm excited! I love period movies!

Anyway...I'd better get back to work. Hope everyone has a good day!

 

[Tigger&Bubba]

Good morning! Just checking in. Patrick is going to Richmond this afternoon to take a licensing exam for work tomorrow. I'm sure he'll do fine, but I think he's a bit nervous about it. He's been studying for weeks. Can we send some good juju his way?

Tonight my sister is staying over so I can help her work on her college applications. She's been putting off for too long - and driving my mother insane - so I finally put my foot down and told her that we are just going to do it. I can think of better ways to spend my free night (DS4 will be at his dad's), but I'm too much of a Mom, even with my siblings. I think I'll be taking myself to see "Marie Antoinette" tomorrow since I want to see it but don't want to subject Patrick to it. I'm excited! I love period movies!

Anyway...I'd better get back to work. Hope everyone has a good day!

Sending pixie dust to Patrick

You are a good big sis

Have a great weekend.

 

[kamgen]

Sending more pixie dust to Patrick!
OMG Megan...I would make him go to the movies with ya! LOL! I mean, it might be torture, but I think he can handle it! LOL!!!! One night Steve and I did two "chick flicks" in a row (we finally had a babysitter and were too excited to see just one movie!). We saw The Lake House and Devil Wears Prada...funny thing is...he wanted to go~! (don't tell! )

Hope everyone has a good weekend. Things here are stressful as ever...my mom is now really sick so I am trying to take care of my dad more for her since she is out of it. My dad finally started morphine yesterday for the pain....he has been putting it off. Looks like it could be soon for him. Steve keeps asking if I am prepared. Heck, I don't know.....who is ever prepared for this, especially since my dad is only 55 years old....oh well. I am dealing with a pretty bad cold myself, so that stinks. But I am blessed....my son is good, my dh is good, and my pregnancy (while exhausting) is so far so good.

 

[Grandma4ever]

Sending more pixie dust to Patrick!
OMG Megan...I would make him go to the movies with ya! LOL! I mean, it might be torture, but I think he can handle it! LOL!!!! One night Steve and I did two "chick flicks" in a row (we finally had a babysitter and were too excited to see just one movie!). We saw The Lake House and Devil Wears Prada...funny thing is...he wanted to go~! (don't tell! )

Hope everyone has a good weekend. Things here are stressful as ever...my mom is now really sick so I am trying to take care of my dad more for her since she is out of it. My dad finally started morphine yesterday for the pain....he has been putting it off. Looks like it could be soon for him. Steve keeps asking if I am prepared. Heck, I don't know.....who is ever prepared for this, especially since my dad is only 55 years old....oh well. I am dealing with a pretty bad cold myself, so that stinks. But I am blessed....my son is good, my dh is good, and my pregnancy (while exhausting) is so far so good.

Your stress must be over the top. I have had to deal with most of that stuff in my life but not all at once. My mom past 2 1/2 years ago after a long illness. She lived a two day drive away so I tried to talk with her on the phone often while she could be understood. Mentally she was gone long before she past. I was able to find closure because I had told her the things I needed for her to hear but it was still hard. Right after, I would still think I needed to call her or would want to tell her something I felt was important. Then I would realize that I couldn't and the grief would return. Each time it was less and less intense.

I can't even imagine what it must be like to have young kids, pregnant, and trying to cope with two parents that are ill. You have my thoughts and prayer for you and your family. Lois

 

[Grandma4ever]

Good morning! Just checking in. Patrick is going to Richmond this afternoon to take a licensing exam for work tomorrow. I'm sure he'll do fine, but I think he's a bit nervous about it. He's been studying for weeks. Can we send some good juju his way?

Tonight my sister is staying over so I can help her work on her college applications. She's been putting off for too long - and driving my mother insane - so I finally put my foot down and told her that we are just going to do it. I can think of better ways to spend my free night (DS4 will be at his dad's), but I'm too much of a Mom, even with my siblings. I think I'll be taking myself to see "Marie Antoinette" tomorrow since I want to see it but don't want to subject Patrick to it. I'm excited! I love period movies!

Anyway...I'd better get back to work. Hope everyone has a good day!

Patrick has all the positive thoughts I can muster. I am sure as you are that he will do fine. Testing is never easy. Lois

 

[kamgen]

Thanks Lois for the kinds words...and thanks Dianna for the pm. You all are so nice to send your prayers. IT does help to have a place like this to escape to.....

 

[Mommaraven]

Thanks for all the pixie dust for Patrick. He called from the road and he's on his way, although the traffic isn't great.

Kamy, my thoughts and prayers are with your family. You know I'm around if you need to vent.

 

[Lisa0503]

Ya kno...

... it might ALSO be a function of how corrupted your HD is or how much open space is left on your HARD DRIVE too. I have found that on my notebook computer my speed issues were all related to these considerations. A lot of applications are huge and the performance limits from memory or processor have been (apparently) a non-issue for me. Now if you know your applications are elegant, powerful and HUGE then maybe memory or processor speed might be an issue. Or maybe - my opinion is meaningless (highly probable too!).

Either way... as I understand it you HD runs optimally with a minimum of 1/3rd of it empty. That is in part because it uses some of the space to swap data as virtual memory - plus when they quote rotation speed and access rates, as well as reading and writing speeds - this is a REAL speed limiter compared to the lightening fast processing speeds of memory and the processor. IE, the hard drive is PHYSICAL and the data reading and writing, as well as the ACCESS speed (related to palatter speed supposedly) emerge as considerations on performance.

Now - if you had a slower processor = then you also might have mismatched data bus archetecture... thus creating another bottle neck - but usually this is not an issue except with the most powerful of applications. Powerful applications are often elegant graphics intensive GAMES... not drafting applications.

SO... to check your hard drive usage... move your pointer to the start button at the bottom left and left click. Normally a universal option on the upper right column is the "MY COMPUTER" option... select it. Now... if you have ONE hard drive in your system then it typically is the "C" drive and will appear in a seperate area with a tiny icon of a drive. Now go ahead and RIGHT click on it and select PROPERTIES. A tabbed window should pop up and a pie chart should accompany the GENERAL tab. The pie chart will show how much of your drive is used and free. NOw... if less than 25% of your drive is free you may have found your speed problem....

If this is the case you need to clear off a lot of junk or underused applications. I recently bought my 2nd external hard drive for my excess data. I got a 250 gigabyte drive for only $89 after rebate. Oh... you should be very careful about transferring stuff around unless you know what you are doing. Get my drift?

ANd if your drive is not overloaded - then it might be severely corrupted or fragmented. You need to run a defragging application. Oh.... if your computer gets lots of use and has never been defragged then this might be the cause of a slow system.

Wow Captiancrash, you really know your stuff when it comes to computers. I am learning as I go.... Basically, I just reformated the HD on my laptop a few months ago so I could start from scratch. I don't have tons of programs on it so as of right now I have a 33GB hard drive with 24.8GB free so my Hard Drive is not the problem. I only have 224 MB of RAM and that is the minimum requirement for Paint Shop Pro (the software I am using for my digital scrapping) This program recommends at least 512MB of RAM which is why it is running so slow. I just ordered 1GB RAM for my computer so hopefully when I get it next week, it will solve my problem. I did find out from all my reasearch that my Intel Celeron processor is not the best for all these graphics programs so next time I 'upgrade' my laptop, I will have to look into getting a Pentium or Athalon processor... After all this aggravation, I really hope I like digital scrapping and actually do it!!!!

Kamy - I am so sorry to hear about your Dad. You and your family are in my thoughts.

 

[nacho1337]

Just a little bumb to get off of page 2

 

[tomspixie]

Sending more pixie dust to Patrick!
OMG Megan...I would make him go to the movies with ya! LOL! I mean, it might be torture, but I think he can handle it! LOL!!!! One night Steve and I did two "chick flicks" in a row (we finally had a babysitter and were too excited to see just one movie!). We saw The Lake House and Devil Wears Prada...funny thing is...he wanted to go~! (don't tell! )

Hope everyone has a good weekend. Things here are stressful as ever...my mom is now really sick so I am trying to take care of my dad more for her since she is out of it. My dad finally started morphine yesterday for the pain....he has been putting it off. Looks like it could be soon for him. Steve keeps asking if I am prepared. Heck, I don't know.....who is ever prepared for this, especially since my dad is only 55 years old....oh well. I am dealing with a pretty bad cold myself, so that stinks. But I am blessed....my son is good, my dh is good, and my pregnancy (while exhausting) is so far so good.

Here is a little aside. My sister was Sandra Bullock's stand in while filming The Lake House. It was filmed up in Chicago. My parents were also extras in the film as well. Kind of fun!
Definitely sending Pixie Dust you guys' way!
Best of days
tif

 

[Tigger&Bubba]

Good evening everyone,

I'm hopin' ya'll are having a good weekend. I have been at Carpenter house all day. Doing my laundry and escaping the floor fumes. Exciting stuff huh I met with our contractor about some more work at Carpenter house and he's telling me we need a new roof! OK, breathe in, breathe out, move on. I feel like we have the never ending renovation story here. Thanks for the outlet. (outlet didn't used to mean electrical to me)

All the house stuff aside, I'll meet up with the boys for breakfast in the morning. With the time change we'll all be hungry. I hope it doesn't take long for the animals to adjust. Bubba wakes me up at 5 am as it is.

See you all later.

 

[Grandma4ever]

Good morning, I think I have become addicted to this board. I am having the time of my life talking and hearing about past disney stuff and planning for the future. I really need to win POWER BALL so I can vacation in style and not need to save every last dime to vacation.

It seems that next September is so far away but past experience tells me it will past fairly fast. Well I just wanted to say good morning to all you nice folks. I am now going to fold the laundry and get ready to go into the office. It is nice to go in on the week-ends because the phones don't ring and there are no interruptions. You see the office is closed on the week-end. I go in on the week-end and take the time off during the week. It works well at least for me. Till later , Mouser/ Lois

 

[LoriS]

It seems that next September is so far away but past experience tells me it will past fairly fast.

I know that feeling all too well, my girls keep asking when we can go back on the cruise. They don't really like the answer next year

This seems like such a great group of people, I really need to post in here more to get to know everyone.

Hope everyone had a good weekend.

 

[kamgen]

Good morning everyone.....
Just needed to vent a minute...
last night was so awful. My dad is getting worse by the second and now hallucinating and getting angry. I know the cancer and lack of oxygen does that....but it is so hard. We were up all night with my mom, trying to help her. Then Ryan woke around 3:30am and was up till 6am....
We are so exhausted today.....and dad doesn't remember anything. He won't take his pain med, so he is up every twenty minutes sick and his breathing is so labored and he is refusing the oxygen.
I feel like a terrible daughter but I hope it is over soon. For my family and for my dad....he is suffering terribley and he looks like he is 100years old
I just want him to have some peace and times like this are so hard to watch. Mom said last night that she feels she has lost all faith I tell her to not give up and that there is a plan that we dont understand, but I understand her feeling that way.....times like this are hard....
Whew....thanks for listening....I know the boards are supposed to be a happy place, but right now I just needed to vent...and my poor dh has listened enough

This cruise can not come soon enough.....

I hope everyone is doing well and thanks for listening...sorry for being the downer

 

[Grandma4ever]

Good morning everyone.....



This cruise can not come soon enough.....

I hope everyone is doing well and thanks for listening...sorry for being the downer

Kamy,

Hey this is Janet,

You don't need to feel sorry.
It is obvious that we are all a bunch of people living the typical ups and downs of life. DCL such seems to be one of our ups we all share.
I see know reason why we can't share the downs as well.

That is enough of that! I do sarcasm and silly comes much easier to me then supportive!!!

Hang in there.

Janet

 

[Mommaraven]

Kamy, I'm sending out lots of love to you and Steve. Hang in there chick. I know it's not easy but you'll make it. Give me a shout if you need to.

 

[kamgen]

Thanks everyone! Hope everyone had a nice weekend....
tomorrow Steve is off work, so we are running some errands. I will check online sometime when I can.....just trying to keep us off page two! LOL!

 

[kimgregg]

Hello everyone, I just wanted to post a picture of my pirates.....
I bought these outfits for the trip next year but I think Wyatt will outgrow his before then!