Computers and country music...

Since the weather turned back to March and I had a computer problem to work on anyway, I have been home for the last few days. This will change today as it is supposed to warm up into the 50's today... whooopeee!!! 50's and the first of May. Not unusual at all, don't get me wrong, but not what I would prefer. The mid 50's are comfortable enough for bike riding as long as I have a few hills to climb every now and then. I'm thinking about heading up the Bizz today but that thought is a work in progress... we'll see.

Computer problem.. yeah! Not my computer, but sort of a burden anyway since it was such an unusual problem. This thing is running Win XP on 256mb of RAM... first problem. I know my friend Tom's computer also has similar specs, and his isn't any faster but the RAM for his machine was too expensive to upgrade it. I checked and they can get 2 gigs of RAM for this one for about $50.

But after I cleaned this thing up and got it running again, I ran into a very weird problem. You can't uninstall anything from the Add/Remove Programs applet. For some strange reason all of the registry keys for uninstall are gone. I did a system restore and got them back but then had to go through cleaning it up again... and they disappeared again. Apparently something I uninstalled took all the registry keys with it. There is an easy work around... don't uninstall anything. Actually, some programs have an uninstaller that came with them, so those could be uninstalled and anything installed from now on should be OK, but I just hate it when things don't work the way they are supposed to. I don't want to have to go through the long cleanup process again so it's going back to the owner like it is. No real downsides to this unless you really, really want to uninstall something, then all you need to do is reinstall over the existing installation and then uninstall it. So another lesson in operating system glitches... ya gotta love that!!!

Fish are biting!

Yesterday I met Chris up at the lake and we tried to find a place to fish for the first few hours. The lake was about the busiest I have ever seen it and it reminded me why I stay away from here on weekends. We saw some large bass but couldn't get them to hit, trying rapalas and plastic worms. Eventually we started catching fish and some of them were really nice.

The crappie are starting to school up and we caught quite a few of them and they were quite large. We started using a bobber and jig setup and caught bass and crappie with that rig. Chris caught 2 big bass, one weighed 3 lbs 14 oz, which is the one in the picture here, and he got another one that weighed just 1 oz under 3 lb.

Even though we had a slow start, the fishing was actually pretty good. I caught 37 fish, lots of them nice solid keepers if I had a mind to keep some. OK, I did keep a few but all the big ones went back in, including that nice crappie, which was full of eggs.