While My Download Gently Creeps

This CD burning malarkey is all to do with a new printer I bought the other day. It's an HP Deskjet 3845, and is more a sort of family purchase than just for me. (My mother, you see, likes the way that photos come out when printed on ordinary paper. She finds it useful, too, as an artist.)

Although I've now had the printer for two days, it is yet to print a single page. It's 'cause my operating system is just a bit too old, so I'm downloading a more recent one. Four CD's worth. And burning it onto CDs. And, to be on the safe side, I'm backing up lots of stuff, onto many CDs, lest something go horribly wrong during the upgrade. (My last big upgrade adventure was when I stuck a 40GB hard drive in my computer, and had to transfer lots of stuff from the old hard drive to the new. I did that by backup and restoration, and it went almost swimmingly.)

I'm now downloading the third CD, and thought I'd pass the time by telling you all about it. (That's you all in the sense of there maybe being more than one of you, not all about it in the sense of all the gory details.) Broadband internet access is a wonderful thing.

Dum, de dum...

Less than 300MB to go on this CD. I wonder if my ISP will notice? Or mind? It's not every day I download a whole, big operating system (although I have downloaded a couple of others recently, just to try them out on a spare computer as possible, future upgrades).

While I'm waiting, I'll tell you why I chose HP. It's because they're not a Microsoft-(and-Apple)-only outfit. Or, more accurately, they're actively supporting and contributing to Open Source software. In other words: they're friendly to freedom!