Well having used it for only a few hours today and an hour last week I can already say I can do more complicated, impressive drawings with Inventor than ProDesktop. What’s more is it is so intuitive to use that I can’t wait to use it with classes - by all acounts there are copies of the software scattered in schools just lying unused because the teachers don’t know where to start. Lots to do though so that’s all for now.
Despite the best intentions for tonight I’ve wasted most of it. I acquired a copy of Inventor recently which will come in handy for work but getting it installed has been nothing but hassle, every time I tried I got a Fatal error 0×7927e03e and it failed, then the debugger failed. There wasn’m much coming up from google but eventually I narrowed it down to a problem with .net framework 1.1, this in itself shouldn’t have been a problem but uninstalling that didn’t happen easily, eventually I (fingers crossed - it’s still installing) got things to work using a couple of tools then reinstalling, I’m not sure which worked, but so far things seem to be working. This post is in the spirit of helping others who got the same error message but unfortunately I don’t have any definitive advice.
Now for the rest of the night, some pottering about with Inventor (if it installs properly) then Grand Designs, which is the programme of choice at the moment with some essay writing in the background.
I feel pretty well kitted out at the moment. I seem to have been on something of a shopping spree, but it’s all been pretty cheap.
It all started off so innocently with a microphone/earphone/headset thingy for a whole penny. Then I found a (very) cheap hard drive, I’ve wanted a way of backing up my files for ages and this seemed perfect. Unfortunately as soon as I had clicked to buy it I realised that it was an internal drive! What a schoolboy error! Anyhow, I also got a little USB gadget that acts as a wireless network card, that way I could also backup my desktop machine and transfer across all the files I want onto the laptop.
Then, having wondered what to do about my useless internal drive - which I also found out to be SATA and not IDE as advertised - I stumbled across the idea of an enclosure. You install your internal drive in a metal box which has an adapter so you can plug it into the USB port of any machine. Perfect!
I got it all set up tonight, using the refreshingly simple and effective Maxblast from Maxtor to create partitions and format the drive before setting up a regular backup using the bogstandard backup tool on windows. The first backup should finish in a few minutes.
Just for an extra bit of showmanship I’ve had the webcam out as well while I wrote this post. You can see my lovely new enclosure on flickr.
Good night, I’m off to write an essay.
[tags]gadgets, drives, maxtor[/tags]
