Tosh, originally uploaded by spinneyhead.

I have been given a Toshiba laptop to review by the people at talktoshiba. Which is nice, except that we can’t get it to talk to the wireless.

The computer is a Tecra A8. I don’t have access to the technical specs right now, I may dig them out later. Today’s mission, between trying to fix a puncture 15 times (which is another story altogether), was to test connectivity. First, I wanted to transfer yWriter and WeFi from my PC. This was easy enough once I sorted out bluetooth ids.

Next I needed to send a yWriter project from my normal (borrowed) laptop, an old but reliable Toshiba Portege. I plugged an IR dongle into the back of the Tecra and it recognised it but didn’t want to use it for anything. I lined the two laptops up, but the Portege couldn’t detect the dongle. This looks like something I will have to try again.

Most annoying of all, I can’t get the Tecra to connect to the internet in the house. I’ve tried it around town with WeFi, where it can detect lots of wireless nodes. It could connect to the pay wireless in Cafe Nero, which wasn’t much use. On Albert Square there were dozens of nodes detectable, but none- not even StreetNet which I’ve used before- could be connected to. I didn’t have the Portege with me to do a side by side test, but I can say that it has been used to surf from the Albert memorial.

Damian has pointed out that I can just plug it into the house network with a cable, which is what I will do later, but it does kind of defeat the object of a laptop.

Tomorrow I’ll get the rest of the software onto the laptop and start using it properly.