Six weeks today already since I left the UK for Mallorca on my way here. The world has changed so much in that time, and the future has shrunk to 'grateful to still be alive, just one day at a time'.
After my walk in the afternoon, I took the car, to dispose of a large box of recyclable empties to the roadside receptacles just past Es Cuco supermarket, closed for the afternoon. The area was deserted. It was good to get out again. Now Easter is over, I think I'm relaxing and adjusting to this situation a bit more. Going out in the car didn't feel quite like an ordeal. It's not a matter of confidence, but I have been reluctant to push myself for fear of coming adrift and making mistakes - probably a legacy of a year's confinement, minimising the physical stress on my wound. Things have improved a good deal, pleasingly enough, since I have been here. Feeling less uneasy in myself is a sign of putting all that trauma behind me, and feeling more at home in myself and in my environment, uncommon though it is.
Yesterday evening, I got around to examining the redundant Compaq laptop in the study. It has been stripped of personal data, still had some software on it, but ran so terribly slowly it was unusable. It had AVG on it and flagged up virus content but struggled to rid the machine of malware. It was also a low powered consumer Windows 7 machine, unsupported now by Microsoft. With Dave's consent I tried to install a live bootable version of Linux Mint XFCE edition on it from the installation flash drive that travels in my digital tool kit. It booted to a functional desktop of sorts, but not install on the laptop.
It took me a while to remember it was a version for 64 bit devices and the Compaq is so old it's a 32 bit device very under-powered. I downloaded a Mint 32 bit version ISO to another flash drive, then used a spare SD memory card to make a live bootable disk to use. It wouldn't book from the laptop's card reader, but I had a USB card reader in my tool kit. The live version of Mint 32 bit booted nicely from this and proceeded to install perfectly on the laptop, giving it a new lease of life as a fully working machine. It's not lightning fast, as the hard drive is slow, but it's quite usable for all but complex demanding task like video and audio editing. That too cheered me up no end.
Yesterday evening, I got around to examining the redundant Compaq laptop in the study. It has been stripped of personal data, still had some software on it, but ran so terribly slowly it was unusable. It had AVG on it and flagged up virus content but struggled to rid the machine of malware. It was also a low powered consumer Windows 7 machine, unsupported now by Microsoft. With Dave's consent I tried to install a live bootable version of Linux Mint XFCE edition on it from the installation flash drive that travels in my digital tool kit. It booted to a functional desktop of sorts, but not install on the laptop.
It took me a while to remember it was a version for 64 bit devices and the Compaq is so old it's a 32 bit device very under-powered. I downloaded a Mint 32 bit version ISO to another flash drive, then used a spare SD memory card to make a live bootable disk to use. It wouldn't book from the laptop's card reader, but I had a USB card reader in my tool kit. The live version of Mint 32 bit booted nicely from this and proceeded to install perfectly on the laptop, giving it a new lease of life as a fully working machine. It's not lightning fast, as the hard drive is slow, but it's quite usable for all but complex demanding task like video and audio editing. That too cheered me up no end.
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