My wife is incredibly pregnant
My wife is incredibly pregnant. We're going to have a baby any day now and she's feeling aches and pains all over, the poor thing. I actually need to clean the apartment with one good once-over, but I keep putting it off because it's going to be a couple of hours of dust in the air and the vacuum cleaner running and I've got a ton of other little things to do.
The Webcam (link below) that I just got up and running is actually a "grandson" cam for my parents in New Hampshire and my brother in Los Angeles. It took a while to set up because my Dell Latitude only has one USB port. We signed up for Telefonica ADSL a few months ago and they gave us the crappiest USB-DSL-Modem you can imagine. I had to send it back two times because it just stopped working. So that sucks up my one USB port. For a while, I was plugging my USB mouse (the one with the infrared on the bottom) into the mouse port, but it's horrible that way - not nearly as smooth as the USB. So finally when I wanted to go get a little webcam, I had to buy a hub also.
The first USB hub I bought was one of those portable jobbies without a power supply. It wasn't nearly powerful enough for the DSL modem, let alone the camera. I don't know what I was thinking. Then I bought one with the power, a little grey model from a Spanish company and for some reason it wouldn't install! It's supposed to be detected by Windows 2000 automatically, but it wouldn't find the drivers. I called the company and it was great: the guy picked up the phone immediately! No hold times, no problems. He said that my system should detect the hub without problems and we walked through it together (in Spanish) but it still didn't work. It's a pretty basic operation, so he said to return the hub since it obviously was defective. So that's what I did. But when I got the replacement home, it didn't work either! So I got smart and plugged it into my wife's laptop, which is a perfect twin of mine, and it worked perfectly. Ugh! So what's wrong with MY computer?!?!
After a week of playing with it, I finally figured out that the install of the very first hub was blocking the install of the second. I finally sat down yesterday and spent 4 hours playing with the registry and the hardware settings and FINALLY got the thing to install by a combination of deleting the old hub and manually editing a .inf file in the Windows directory. UGH!
Okay, so finally, the baby-cam is in place. Now where the heck is the baby!?! ;-)
-Russ