Welcome to jkg3.com

Recently a friend came to me with a problem, they had a HP omnibook XE3 that was running windows XP pro, but could not seem to connect to networks. After a little bit of looking around it seemed that this has been caused by a reinstall without the appropriate drivers. Seemed simple to fix so I downloaded the drivers and I tried to install them. From here on in the problem deepened.

The driver installer installed the driver happily, but when you placed in the wireless adaptor the new hardware wizard was unable to find the “file specified� to install the driver. After a bit of digging about online, I found an answer to the problem. The HP omnibook has some custom hardware, which is not included in the standard Windows XP install disk that had been used to restore the laptop a while before I got involved.

I looked online to see if I could find an original HP install disk, but no luck, so I started thinking outside of the box.

This laptop was only needed for checking e-mail, and a little bit of web browsing. This was a job fro ubuntu.

After popping into a local computer shop I walked away with the shiny install disks for ubuntu 5.10 “breezy badger�. However, I already knew that this version would not natively support the belkin wireless adaptor so I sought to upgrade.

After borrowing a friends Internet connection I downloaded the ISO for ubuntu 6.06 dapper drake (which I knew supported the adaptor) and I then burnt it to a disk. But sadly this did not go right. In hindsight I think I know why, I was using Very cheap disks which kept having errors when burnt to.

So the next step is to find some better quality disks, and to burn the ISO successfully. Then hopefully we will have a functioning, all but virus proof email and internet machine.

Watch this space….