[ct-user] CT on Vista - any hope of doing this quickly?

[Dave Haupt]

I ran NAQP using CT10 on a very crusty old laptop.  Found a few errors, failed at "fix mine" and then found "fm10".  Whew.  Problem averted.

Then when I uploaded the logs, the robot flagged my other error - although I'd set the laptop's time zone to UTC, I had set the time itself to local, so I was off 7 hours.

This time, I had to find out how to deal with it.  Had to download CT_TIME on another computer (the laptop has no networking ability), then transfer to the laptop via floppy.  Failed...more study, and figure out CT_TIME had a different version for CT10.  OK, found that compendium of files and transferred to the laptop the same way...but oops, no, that's not working...the laptop's floppy drive has now failed.  I have no way to move data off this laptop now.  I can burn a CD and then let the laptop read it - but the CD drive in the laptop is not a burner.  I attempted to add a network card to the machine, and it starts asking for Windows 95 disks - it refuses to search for files on the W95 CD (which is how I loaded W95 on the machine).  So I think I'm dead in the water with respect to that laptop.  It's toast.

So...somewhere in this process, I DID manage to save a copy of the *.bin file to a floppy and I CAN load that onto another computer.  The most "available" machines I have, though are a Core2duo running Vista x64, and a G4 vintage Mac.  I'm guessing the Mac is silly to even think about.  How about Vista x64?

I suppose the FINAL backup method would be to load the Cabrillo file (yep, I managed to get that onto the floppy, too), get the data over into Excel, do some math on all the QSO times, then have Excel re-format into Cabrillo-equivalent *.txt and kiss my CT DOS days good bye.

But it would be nice not to have to do the Excel work.

If it isn't obvious from all the above, I do not enjoy time spent in front of a screen....I'm no computer wiz!

TNX ES 73,

Dave W8NF