(winnitude, from here)

Solved two computer problems tonight, without even breaking a sweat.  At church, on Sundays, after the service, there’s a delay of 45 minutes before we can leave.  I record the service (using Audacity) as a single file.  There’s not enough time to stop recording, save, and start again.  So after the service I break up the massive file into parts, and then burn the 7+ CDs (using DeepBurner).  It’s part of the ministry, but it’s a bummer having to stick around the church while other people are leaving and eating lunch and coming back before I leave.  I can’t save it to a thumb drive – this old PC only has USB 1.1.  I’m not going to burn a CD for this.  Bettie and I have talked about connecting the sound and projector computers, and she recommended it again Sunday evening.  I made a purchase on Ebay, and the cable came today.  Got them hooked up during praise band practice tonight, got the sharing set up, and everything’s great.  This Sunday, we’ll be able to use the fast PC to suck the .wav file off the sound PC and dump it to a thumb drive connected to the faster projector PC.  And go out to lunch with people if we choose to, or simply enjoy an afternoon at home that starts before 2:00.

The other one was with some friends who use Skype.  Their daughter is in France this semester, and free phone calls are much better than pay phone calls.  Unfortunately, in their efforts to mute a microphone, the sound recording portion of the audio system had been deleted.  This PC didn’t understand how to record sounds anymore.  I had tried to mess with it some on Sunday, but to no avail.  I stopped over at their house after sound check and was able to get things working again, using an external mike they had.  We tested it with Skype’s test phone number, and using the sound recorder built into Vista.  Success.  I didn’t do much more than use the control panel to enable and disable certain combinations of devices, but they got what they wanted out of it.  Happiness all the way around.