"Maybe I should switch back to espresso."

What problem? My home system has passed "old" and is nearing "museum piece" status. It's an 866Mhz machine with 512MB of RAM and an 18GB hard drive running SUSE Linux 10. For most of what I do at home, this is adequate but it barely qualifies as "bottom-of-the-barrel" for Notes 8 and SUSE 10.

Notes installation, all 880MB, completed in under 5 minutes, making me think it had failed. The trouble I had finding it on the menu increased that impression. Turns out it was in Office-->More Programs-->Lotus Notes 8. Once located, it launched cleanly.

Connecting to my non-Domino ISP was the next challenge. Setting up POP3 under Notes 8 isn't the same as it was with Notes 7 and my old notes weren't helpful. Once mail was working, I decided to open the "office productivity suite" (i.e., Open Office). Then I clicked on Create, to start a second document, and watched both Notes and my first document fade from sight to be replaced by a lengthy script explaining that the programs had crashed.

I restarted the machine and opened the process monitor before starting Notes 8. CPU cycles were pegged at 100%. Memory usage was only slightly lower. Once the client finished opening, and the swap file started working, memory and CPU usage dropped. I opened mail, read a couple of memos, sent out a new memo, and closed Notes while watching the monitor. CPU cycles jumped back to 100% as soon as Notes started closing and stayed there for the 2-3 minutes it took the client to finish unloading.

Thinking things might work better on a cleanly installed machine, I wiped my hard drive. The old installation had been upgraded through several freeware versions of SUSE. I backed up my files and, with Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, started over.

Everything went fine except... I forgot about the TCP/IP settings and the printer settings and the bookmarks under Firefox. Then I couldn't remember how to launch the Notes installation program -- it had been so easy the first time I didn't think to write it down. Maybe I should switch back to espresso.

Three days later the system was installed, my files were back in place, I could get onto the Internet, and Notes 8 was talking to my ISP. The new design may be more intuitive than earlier versions, but the changes can be confusing. I'm spending a lot of time looking for familiar functions. For example: File-->Database-->Open has been replaced with File-->Open-->Notes Application.

The new installation is more stable, but a lazy snail is faster. And my second try at Notes 8 has a different set of options than the first, leaving me confused as to what are quirks with the client and what is a limitation of the machine I'm trying to run it on. Maybe I should give up and get a new machine. But that means re-installing again.

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DominoPower Contributing Editor Nancy Hand is primary Notes admin at a remote site for a large corporation. She earned both Novell and Microsoft certifications in network engineering before being introduced to Lotus Notes. The 3,000 users she supports constantly challenge Nancy to keep up with their creative missteps. With a background in art, she brings a different perspective to working with computers and their users. In the past, Nancy has worked in the fields of accounting, criminal justice, and museum display. To balance the challenges of the job, she continues to draw and sculpt between stabs at writing novels and designing knitware.