Household computers

Ted gave Elle his old laptop. It is a dell with XP. It is not an old computer, but it has some issues. That is completely normal for an old laptop. That is just a symptom of having everything in one package. Not everything is going to work forever. My mother's old laptop has a bad USB port. No bit deal. Ted's old laptop, having traveled all over the place with him, has a couple lines running up the screen and no battery. That is par for the course. No big deal.

However, the OS on the system is broken. Ted said something about "Disable the handicap setting." I have no idea what he meant.

The symptom is the keyboard does not work when the login screen comes up until a beep is heard. Well, it doesn't work even after that. It is not just the keyboard on the laptop, any keyboard fails. The laptop keyboard and external keyboard work fine to get in to and around in the BIOS.

Ted, what did you do?

I booted the laptop up on Linux and everything seems to work as expected. It is a setting in XP. I do not have an XP key so I cannot just reinstall the OS. That would be illegal. Elle wants to play a bunch of Windows games so there is no point on installing Linux. The laptop is kind of just sitting there for now until I can get some tools from work and run the repair scripts on it. That will not happen until after next Monday if I remember.

One good thing that happened out of this is that Elle cleaned up her computer area. We filled two huge boxes of junk and got them out of the house. Elle does not know this, but we intend to throw most of the crap out. Some will go to the kid's resell shop down the street. The clearing allowed me to put my father's old computer in the place of the broken computer. It still has a copy of XP on it and runs pretty well. Elle can play her games.

Eventually I'm going to have to get some nanny software on that box so we can get Elle online. Her school has a login to some web page they want her to use to run some program for teaching.  I do not understand what they are after. If you ask me, first through third grade should be pencil and paper topics only. What do I know?