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Technical Difficulties: The Bane of the Online GM

Occasionally I find myself needing to GM online from my laptop rather than my desktop, most recently because of a sore back.  Unfortunately I recently found out that my laptop suffers from a Windows 7 bug that results in it randomly dropping teamspeak.  This week was one of those weeks, but I thought I had a solution using my cell phone to run teamspeak.  It turns out talking to one person is fine, but my cell freaked out when I connected up for the game.

In a technological hail mary play I thought we'd give the audio a try on Roll20, but the group never entirely got it working.  It resulted in some unhappy players and a cancelled game, not to mention a frustrated gm.

So, I got underway yesterday installing Windows 8 on my laptop.  Windows 8 installed nicely, though Microsoft locked out my license key on the license,  even though I never did get working on my old green monster desktop that died a horrible hardware failure death.  Grrr... that is $80 bucks more for another license.

Windows 8 worked nice.  Unfortunately I took advantage of the free Windows 8.1 upgrade.  It didn't work out.  It trashed all of my drivers which worked on Win 8 but not 8.1.  I have it working reasonably well now after some fighting, though my wireless is flakey and my nvidia video card didn't get a proper hardware accelerated driver.  I am probably going to have to reinstall again.

I go online and drooled a bit over the Surface Pro 3, which I would love to replace this dual core Atom laptop with. Maybe in the spring, if the prices come down I can think about it.  In the meantime maybe I can find a cheap recliner to replace the awful desk chair I have and skip the laptop altogether on Friday nights.  *sigh*
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