And You Think It Can't Get Any Worse

I had the day off yesterday so I thought I would have another crack at getting the wireless connection going.

1. Switch On Laptop
2. Wait for laptop to boot up
3. Still waiting for laptop to boot up
4. Receive message saying somesuch file is missing or corrupt and to please reinstall.

How do you do this when you cannot get into the system in the first place. I did seem to remember making a boot disk when a first bought the laptop and managed to find it lurking in the back of a draw. Phew thought I slotted it in the drive and waited and waited and waited. Bah.

Two options remained, either take it to a specialist and see if they can recover the hard disk or use the Restore Cd's that came with the laptop. Luckily I had been saving anything of any value to CD's so I thought I'd go for the cheaper if not painstaking restore option.

All went well and after much reinstaling of software I now have a working laptop with an extra 5 gig of harddrive space. ( I obvioulsy download a lot of crap).

One thing that I am getting frustrated about is music downloads and transferring to players.

I haven't gone down the iPod route, I use my Palm handheld with Real Player and my other half uses a player purchased from Maplins that supports MP3 and WMA.

I have been downloading my music via MSN which arrives in WMA format. My problem arises when I try to sync the player using Windows Media Player 10. If I leave the music in WMA format it fails everytime so I end up burning tracks to CD to convert to MP3 and then resaving them back. This obviously takes time although I do have to do this to add tracks to my Palm.

Can anyone recommend a good, reasonably priced WMA to MP3 converter to make my day a little less frustrating.