The laptop I use for work is getting a little long in the tooth (about 5 years old now), but still pretty functional, aside from having to have Windows on it. It’s time to make it more functional with some much needed and long overdue upgrades. Windows has been behaving pretty dog slow on it for a while now and is way past time for a fresh install to get rid of 5 years of leftover software crap that’s built up.
2GB RAM – $51
I originally asked for a laptop with 1GB RAM, but for some reason it turned into 512MB when the order was placed. How I’ve been limping along running Windows in 512MB of RAM for all these years, I have no idea. The extra memory will definitely be nice though.
6600mAh battery – $72
About a year ago, the original battery went belly up and stopped holding any significant charge. The battery would last about 10 minutes before petering out, so I was restricted to only being able to use the laptop whenever I could plug in. Kind of defeats the purpose of having a laptop. New battery will make me portable again.
120GB hard drive – $60
I’m nowhere near running out of space on the original 60GB hard drive, but a larger hard drive will give me the chance to set up a dual-boot Linux/Windows system, which is something I’ve always wanted to do. The original drive I’ll pop into an enclosure and use it for portable backup.
Considering the fact that I apparently lost one of the DVI outputs on my work computer video card, on top of the earlier computer fail that happened Monday, I may be tempting fate with all of these upgrades. The way things have been going so far, with my luck some other component in the laptop will die and kill the thing shortly after I get all of these upgrades installed.
An auspicious start. Not!
Came in to work today to discover that a video driver update turned my dual monitor setup into a non-dual monitor setup. Upon rebooting to try and fix said video problem, 2 sticks of RAM (512MB worth) decided to go belly up on me.
Not the start of the work year I was looking for.
Luckily I was able to scavenge a couple of 1GB sticks out of one of the old computers, so now my computer has twice the memory it started with.
Still haven’t fixed the dual monitor problem though.
Why oh Why IE7 Part 2
Now what gives?
Drop down menus appear fine when you hover the mouse over the top level of the menu.
But when you try to mouse over the rest of the menu (provided you get over some invisible gap that makes IE think you’ve moused off the menu), this happens
Naturally it only happens in IE7. Perfectly fine in Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome. Blargh and blargh again.
5 years of Fedora
Wow, I’ve been messing with Fedora for 5 years now. Started off with Fedora Core, and soon Fedora 10 will be hitting the bitstreams.
My, how time flies.
A solution
After a week of mucking about trying different things to fix the problem I was having with the CSS menus dropping down underneath the content section, I found a remarkably simple solution that I didn’t expect to work, but did, at least for IE 7.
MovableType’s built-in templates tend to suffer a little bit from div-itis IMO, but they work pretty well and once you figure things out, makes styling pretty easy.
The basic structure for the menu and content looks something like this:
<div id="main-navigaton">
<div id="main-navigation-inner">(insert nav stuff here)</div>
</div><div id="content">
<div id="content-inner">
<div id="alpha">
<div id="alpha-inner">(insert content here)</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>By putting
#main-navigation-inner { z-index: 1; }in my CSS file, I was able to get the drop down menu to pop up to the top. Works in IE7, but since I don’t have a computer with IE6 on it, I don’t know if it works with IE6 yet.