BTW, I had lots of problems SENDING emails until I removed Kasperky anti-virus. When I installed it approx 30 days ago, everything was fine, then email sending just kept getting more and more problematic until I removed the program and everything is now OK.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing, so I can have it finished before we leave for Peru.

Photo at right of Mai reading her classic novels from the internet websites.  She’s really gotten into reading the English literature classics.

So, after pulling out my hair for several days, I purchased the updated theme and modified it to my liking, so I now have almost everything that I want.

Now I can concentrate on more photos of Ecuador and posts which describe what it is like living here. I keep meeting more and more expats which are moving here both because of the political/financial situation in the USA and the extremely moderate weather here, year around.

The above was typed/entered from my iPod, but it’s rather tedious. After posting the above, I added the photo which shows the WordPerfect icon in the middle row far right.

Hope you like it. Now to post this to the blog — wish me luck!

So, it seems that here in Ecuador, you are paying almost $38/mo for a guaranteed 12.8Kb, $65/mo for a guaranteed 25.6Kb and almost $80/mo for 51.2Kb during peak hours.  When are  peak hours?  Generally from 8:30am to 5pm or 6pm.  Minus the 3 to 4 hours of electrical power outage every weekday and internet gets quite expensive here in Ecuador.

I had better internet service in Hue, Vietnam, 5km in the suburbs — 30Kb to 50Kb day and night.

What I don’t know is if you are charged the extra 12% tax in addition to the stated rates.  All non-food products are charged an additional 12% tax at the checkout — in addition to the import tariffs charged at the border for imported goods.

NOTE:   ETAPANET, offers the following services, depending on the needs of our clients:

• ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line).
  It is called asymmetric because the rate of climb and descent are equal down is usually greater than the rise, considering the trend of customers using the Internet that is to get information rather than to sen

1. RESIDENTIAL .- It guarantees 10% of the contracted rate at peak hours, this service is recommended for households, professionals, businesses and small businesses.
2. CORPORATE LEVEL 2 .- guarantees 25% of the contracted rate at peak hours, this service is recommended for SMEs.
3. CORPORATE LEVEL 1 .- guarantees 50% of the contracted rate at peak hours, this is recommended for large firms

SHDSL (Symmetric Digital Subscriber Line).
Simétrica is called because the rate of climb and descent data are equal

1. CORPORATE LEVEL 1 .- guarantees 100% of the contracted rate is recommended for businesses that use Voice over IP, Video and Data Base

When a young lady from England requested some of the Spanish-learning MP3s which I had to be put on her iPod, I couldn’t do it because Apple’s iTunes said that her iPod was synced to iTunes on another computer and if i wanted to change anything, I had to delete everything and start again.

POed at Apple’s need to control everything through iTunes, I went surfing for an open source program which would directly access the mp3s on my iPod, bypassing Apple’s iTunes solution.

After many false starts and freeware downloads which were crippled software unless I purchased an upgraded version, I came across the following open source software which did exactly what I wanted — added songs directly to the iPod, exported selected songs and backed up all the songs onto the computer.  If it sounds good to you, you can obtain SharePod, too.  It solved my problems and I am extremely happy with it.

While searching for the solution, I inadvertently downloaded a program which spontaneously booted my system and prevented me from going into ’safe’ mode to fix the problem.  Solution?

I spent most of today restoring my Fujitsu laptop back to it’s October 16th backup. I lost a few things, but I kept all my email because I put my email on a non-system partition.

Why am I writing about this — because I’ve spent many hours during the last week working to solve numerous problems related to Windows 7 and Toshiba hiccups.

To get the Toshiba laptop to connect to the internet has been a major hurdle.  The old Fujitsu laptop connected without any problems, but the Toshiba with Windows 7 would connect but not receive an IP number.  So many things I tried to no avail — surfing the internet for solutions, updated drivers, etc.

However, today while changing the folder permissions, etc., I suddenly found the Toshiba connected to the internet.  What did I change that made the difference, I really am not sure, but it now connects to the internet without any problems.

Even though I’ve spent all day today disk partitioning, installing software, backing up and finally getting the Toshiba connected to the internet, I feel tired but relieved that I seem to have solved almost all of my problems with the Toshiba.  Now, Megan and Mai can use the lightweight laptop with a 5-7 hour battery life for Megan’s home schooling.

I’m also extremely happy because I’ve succeeded in installing Rosetta Stone v3 software with Latin American Spanish levels 1, 2 and 3.  It is an excellent program to use when learning a foreign language.

Windows 7 needs new software for disk partitioning, virtual drives, etc.  After much searching on the internet , I found EASEUS Partition Master 4.0.1 Home Edition which is both FREE and works in Windows 7.  EASEUS also has a FREE backup/restore program EASEUS Todo Backup which is also FREE  I haven’t yet tried it on Windows 7.

The Toshiba also cannot boot from an external USB hard drive.  You can, however, copy the Toshiba to a 8GB USB stick and use it to boot from and restore Windows 7 to it’s original configuration.  Application and drivers are put onto another 2GB USB stick.