DATA DUMP (3)

It's one thing to have a brush with death, escape from a data dump with an external hard drive, and get a brand new laptop. It's quite another to make said laptop work properly.

Fortunately I have a neighbour who knows how to do that sort of thing. There are five houses on the cul-de-sac off a cul-de-sac where I live. Ours is the only one on our side of the road, and there are four on the other. Right at the end, close to the sea, lives my IT-expert neighbour. It was he who got us the high-speed fibre optic cable, since he worked for the electricity company that dug up half of Fünen.

Today I spent three hours round at his house. He got rid of all the unnecessary rubbish that a new computer has on it, showed me how to extract data from the external hard drive and take a back-up, and downloaded all of the windows upgrades that I need, including an anti-virus package. I learned more about computers in that time than I have done in the past 10 years. Enough to be able to go home, configure my E-Mail and get it working, and download a printer driver from the internet so that I can print things out. I am now back on-line.

Walter Blotscher