Computer and Car Drama

Greetings once again from the library! Yesterday I spent some time toying with the home PC. Our 19" monitor had gone out, so I plugged in a 13- or 15-inch one a friend gave us. It appears to be working okay, except that I have to use 800x600 resolution now. Also the buttons that stretch the screen vertically and horizontally are stuck right now. Fortunately, this happened after I got the screen to a decent size!

We also have an HP All-in-One printer/scanner/copier/fax, and it has been behaving badly. I replaced the black ink cartridge, and now it incessantly tells us that we need to insert/reinsert the color ink cartridge. We'll need to wait awhile to purchase a new color cartridge to see if that works, but for now, it exists as a nice paperweight.

The big reason for the home PC activity is that we're having to get temp tags and insurance for the car Mom has given us, a 1983 Datsun Maxima. It had been registered and insured in her name during the past year.

On Saturday I called around and got Jennie and I a 6-month policy for the car. I don't know whether the car will last that long, but we'll see. We need to have proof of insurance documents in order to get temporary license tags, so I asked the representative to fax us the documents.

Needless to say, they didn't come through. Yesterday I saw that the PC had QuickLink, some faxing software that came with it. We'd never used it before, but I figured it was worth trying out.

Jennie called the folks at the insurance company this morning, and they faxed the documents to our PC. I was then able to save them to a diskette to bring to the library to print out. Unfortunately, they won't come up in any of the office applications.

I think we'll have to return home, save the documents in a more ubiquitously-known file format, and then come back here to the library to print them out.