FREE AT LAST

Dick Pountain/06 September 2001/14:30/Idealog 86

It feels like several years since I last gave a run down on the current state of my computing environment, my virtual office that exists on the other side of the screen - now would a good time because it has changed in a quite dramatic fashion. I have finally, after almost two years of hedging, havering and parallel testing, abandoned a desktop computer altogether in favour of a notebook as my main machine.

That solves a number of problems I've described in previous columns at a single stroke - wherever I go, my main PC environment now goes with me, so I no longer need to worry about my email database getting split between different PCs, or synching versions of my data files - and the only new problem it raises is backing up against the possibility of theft or total destruction. None of this would have been possible had I not found a notebook that I can live with, in the unlikely form of an IBM Thinkpad 600x. The screen and keyboard are both quite small on this machine, but the LCD is the sharpest I have ever seen, making my previous laptops and my desktop's monitor look positively fuzzy by comparison. I very soon adapted to life in a small, sharp world. As to the small keyboard, by some weird fluke of ergonomics I can type on it all day without strain: its very narrowness seems to put my wrists at the same in-turned angle I'm used to from my previous ergonomic keyboard, and IBM's key-click is, as always, immaculate.

By installing Windows 2000 Professional in place of Windows NT4 I've regained use of the USB and infrared ports, so I've attached a Wacom Graphire tablet to satisfy my preference for a pen (plus I get a bonus wheel-mouse for web browsing) and I've started IR-synching my Palm m100 so I no longer need the naff travel kit and I have a free serial port. Yes you heard that right - m100. I recounted here my disastrous falling out with the rechargeable Palm V, but in that same column I derided the m100 as being 'Fisher Price'. I now retract that slur unconditionally - mine's still using the same set of AAAs I installed in April and I've grown to like its rounded design. I can throw it into any old bag or pocket and not worry about scratching it, and I even like its flip lid (if only they could put a mobile phone into that...)

For backup I have my external HP M820 CD Writer, but what's new there is that I've discovered, via a Web search, how to make bootable CDs. By consciously forcing myself to keep my C: drive below 1.8 gigabytes, I can now fit a Norton Ghost image of it onto a CD, along with a DOS CD-ROM driver - which means I can restore the system in under 10 minutes by booting from a single CD, even if Windows is stone dead. My data fits onto a second (non-bootable) CD, and I plan to keep it that way by periodical archiving onto CDs. As to software, I still use Palm Desktop as my PIM, Ameol as my email client (Email virus? What exactly is that again?), TextPad and Word 97 for writing, and Paintshop Pro 6 for painting. And this whole kit - pen, pad, CD-Writer and all - fits into a nice brown leather shoulder bag that looks nothing like a laptop case and so doesn't attract international bag-snatchers.

I'm spending quite a lot of time in Italy nowadays, so the remaining jigsaw piece was a cross-border ISP. On upgrading to Windows 2000 I'd hopefully installed AOL 6 and was planning to used that, as I had done under Windows 95 - there are local AOL PoPs in both Florence and Perugia. Fat chance. Though it had worked just fine in London, when I asked AOL 6 to find the local access numbers it oddly announced that it was dialling a UK number to find them, and then returned none. I manually entered the Italian numbers I already knew, but after successfully connecting and password checking I found 'network service refused'. Most suspiciously, the pull-down menu in Expert Add no longer offers AOLGlobalNet and AOLGlobalNet Plus as network options, only AOLNet and TCP/IP. A call to AOL Technical Support confirmed my suspicion that AOL 6 under Windows 2000 will not work in foreign climes: their excuse is that 'Windows 2000 uses protocols that are not compatible with the local phone companies'.

I've since discovered that it doesn't work in Australia either, and presumably many other countries too. My first cynical thought was that killing off overseas operations might be a way to save AOL some money, to cover the losses on the freephone service but since AOL 5 on my old Win95 machine still works fine in Italy, that's nonsense. It seems to be a case of genuine cock-up, but whether that's AOL's, Microsoft's or Telecom Italia's cock-up is impossible, at present, to say. However the setback provided a good excuse for me to get GRIC (aka Cix Roaming) working again, to use my Cix IP account instead. I had it working last year but it for some reason had refused to work this year - eventually I discovered that my username needed to have '@cix.co.uk' appended to it, but whether I knew that last year and had forgotten, whether Windows just lost it, or whether they've changed the format is anyone's guess. I don't care, because it works now. The nearest GRIC servers are in north Italy, further than AOL in Perugia, but it still beats having to open a second ISP account.