Fighting with computers

I did it again: I fell for another new toy. This time the winner was the inexpensive Acer 3002 WTMi that packs quite a decent feature set into a small size and weight. I won't bore you with the details, but have a look a it if you're planning to buy a light small form laptop . It comes with WinXP Home Edition installed and, as usual, you'll have a hard time if you try to get a refund on it. Microsoft's tax seems to be a burden if you buy a laptop either you like it or not. Although I've installed SuSE Linux 10.0 I'm not very happy with the results for the moment. First of all you need not to use APIC for the installation to start. The system installed very quickly and it did one of my FAT32 partitions to shrink without any problem. It took less than 15 minutes to get the install finished. What I've got working are graphics, WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, DVD-RW and synaptics mouse (the latter even better than with Windows) but sound is missing (it looks like an

Dealing with software you cannot change is a risky business. This time I need to emulate a serial communication to fool the software to think it is talking to a directly connected device. I have tested several serial port emulation software with not much luck. However I have to tell you the guys at Fabula Tech have a winner with their Network Serial Port Kit . It worked like a charm, providing a way of sharing a serial port on one computer so a second computer could use it remotely through a network connection. Not only this, but these guys have a fantastic on-line support chat that, contrary to most of them nowadays, they are knowledgeable and they solved my problem at the first shot. Really recomended product and service. However, I needed a solution I could throw at a client's computer even without network card. I looked around for serial device servers and Digi One SP looked a good choice. I bought a couple of units to see if they could really replace a serial cable (you repla