Friday 00:50 

• On Tuesday  
• I was rudely awoken by the postman at 9:30. Took delivery of 2 items
•  AC Adapter for the non-working Dell Machine.  Got the system running by fiddling with the socket (may need to replace it) – wiped it and re-installed XP Home and updated with SP3. Went to bed.
• Photobook arrived from Jessops. It’s a glossy brochure of photos. This is a composite of our cruise photos, made up by me using their (good) downloaded software. The resulting 34 pages of A4 size design (the option I chose) is uploaded to them and they post back an excellent quality book. All for about £22. You can find out about it here . 
• Helping Sian with new laptop choice – very technical, must be able to fit under the settee – less than 30mm thick.
• Replaced architrave on dining room doors – to match the replacement doors previously installed – now the remaining bits need de-varnishing and redoing to match. 

On Wednesday

•  The new Dyson arrived (fortunately in the afternoon so I didn’t need to get up before 10:30) – it worked!
• Stripped the architrave
• No callers desperate to buy a laptop or desktop
• The Dell laptop is running very slowly – trying to find out what’s wrong
• Sian got a Dell X300 from ebay using goofbay to snipe the bid. See here  for info about sniping and goofbay

On Thursday

•  Finished work on Emma’s bathroom – looks good – will get some photos
• Dell laptop – ran a little utility to measure CPU and memory performance (see here ). CPU OK , memory slow by a factor of 10. Swopped out memory with another laptop and still no improvement. The memory works OK in another laptop. Motherboard duff? Changed power setting in XP to “Desktop” and memory runs OK ! Might be a coincidence or still might be power socket issue. To be continued…..