Hi! Holger,

On 10/06/2016 09:45 AM, you wrote:

 HG> Good evening Paul,

Spot on, Holger!  Good evening to you too.

 HG> Knowing that Jean recently had a blockage in the arteries from/to the
 HG> heart, and that he is only one year younger than I, makes me worry about
 HG> how he's recovering.

If he'd reading (and I do know he is), then he is fine and doing well.

 PQ>> Ahmm... the "Great Race" is on this weekend, Holger.
[ ...trimmed... ]
 HG> I do however expect a new weekly listing today, since usually they do
 HG> have a new listing on thursdays.

Cool.  Apparently this year's trophy will be celebrating Peter Brock's memory.

 HG> On the Windows front, I'm progressing, and hoping it wouldn't do its
 HG> old-time-tricks of suddently removing programs. That happened on the
 HG> laptop a couple of days ago.

I gave up on Windows 8.1 after I got a pop-up from Hewlett-Packard advising
that the warranty had expired, and, also being bugged by Avast warnings about
renewing my registration.  There were other reasons similar to yours...

Windows used to take some sort of perverted pleasure from alternately killing
running programs.  The affected programs included: a binkD point (just the
mailer, nothing else behind it); also, a BOINC manager running a couple of
SETI jobs; and, the easiest to notice when -not- running were some desktop
"gadgets" providing an analogue clock and a couple of graph meters measuring
network & memory usage.

But the crunch for Windows was when it started to kill off running VirtualBox
PCs just for kicks.  That I couldn't stand.  I knew then that Windows didn't
have a future for me on that machine.

Windows was probably running a background timer compiling statistics for M$,
to see how long it took me to notice something was missing.

 HG> On the stationary machine it was still working yesterday, knock-on-wood!

Watch for splinters!  :)

 HG> A couple of days ago, it had made the VLC progran unusable, so I had to
 HG> reinsltall it. I got the original icon on the bottom line, but the icon
 HG> on the desktop, the VLC icon still tells me that the shortcut doesn't
 HG> work, because it can't find VLC.exe, even though it's still and now in
 HG> the original directory. Oh well, Windows!!!

I've had mixed results with VLC just in the last week, with my new Linux
configuration.  But with regard to Windows, I think there's dialogue via a
right-click & properties to show Windows where that shortcut can find the .exe
file.

[ ...some personal text removed... ]

 HG> On the speaker front, I bought a similar set that I have bought a couple
 HG> of years ago for my 23" LED TV, that does have a built-in DVD reader.

Mmm...

 HG> I have been satisfied with them, but when I connected the new set to the
 HG> stationary computer I got very distorted sound. I did connect them to the
 HG> laptop, same distorted sound.

Mmm...

 HG> Then, I connected the new set to the TV, instead of the earlier ones.
 HG> Nice and clean audio from the same DVD as b4.

Ah-ha!  It was probably the act of multiple unplug & plug-in actions that
helped.  Or, the elevation of the moon.  That's about the level of my
knowledge of electronics.  ;)

Cheers,
Paul.

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