Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Boo Hoo and Hiss Hiss

I'm going to post the Bushism for today right now - or by the time I finish my lovely rant here below, I may very well forget that I haven't done that as yet! Early senility setting in here at a rampant pace you know!

"I appreciate my love for Laura." - Washington, D.C.; April 20, 2005

I just bet you do, DUBYA!
Now, on to the more unsettling things that have been permeating my life for the past 24 hours -well, actually since about 7 p.m. Friday night after the computer guy got my new computer set up and left me to my own devices.
The computer, over the weekend, wasn't really a problem -other than the issues with the Family Tree Maker which won't let me copy files I have saved (in Family Tree Maker format no less) over to the computer so I can once again, log in and work on my family trees with relative ease. Well, that and when I tried to re-load the Windows Office Professional Suite, initially it wouldn't read the first disc but I got that squared away on Monday. Just gently wiped it off and presto magic, it worked! (I even had occasion on Monday to use the Frontpage program - the Image composer - for the first time, ever! Neat!
Yesterday though was a horse of a different color! Boy, was it ever!
I don't remember exactly what time my troubles began - sometime in the afternoon I think. It's all pretty much a big blur because it was so consistently a problem that who can separate out specific times.
It started with my system just crashing - I think I moved the mouse and all of a sudden, I was staring at a black screen and then, watching XP sign back in again - only to do the same thing to me numerous times during the late afternoon, throughout the evening and till the wee hours of the morning. At one point, it even crashed on Adobe when I clicked on the pdf file to read the Valentine's Day e-book!
I still have no idea what caused all these woes - haven't been able to get through today to the Computer Shop. But besides having the whole system crash on me numerous times, having it even go through the CHKDSK thing to reboot XP, I also lost my anti-virus thing for a short time. I never shut it down but it somehow, magically, was showing that it was indeed turned off. Got that fixed.
THen, my Firefox browser got lost. Took me about three tries to download that program again, reinstall it -a couple of times - before it finally began to work properly.
Then, I reinstalled my Eudora e-mail program - just out of general principles, really.
And finally, I even downloaded the Explorer seven program and reinstalled it too because it was acting very strangely too!
All that activity took me up till about 4:30 in the morning and by that time, I was majorly stressed out as well as dog-assed tired too and I just gave up then and went to bed!
So far today, I've only had a problem once with the system when it froze up on me. I hate when that happens as I know when I had the other unit and Windows 98, when I would have to quit by just turning the power off to the computer, upon startup again, it would give me the lovely message to always quit by using the start button, etc. Well Hell's bells! I would have gladly done that if the freaking equipment hadn't just frozen me out to where I couldn't click anything on ya know!
So, just cross your fingers and hope things are on a smoother path now. Well, all except for the Yahoo messenger that is. If a contact I am talking to there has a photo posted on their site of yahoo messenger, all it looks like now on my computer is a lousy negative! And, as yet, I haven't found a way to correct that so I am taking suggestions there!
And, if you have any ideas as to why my computer went nutso -whacky on me yesterday, feel free to let me know your thoughts on that too.
The snowed in old lady here in central Pennsylvania is leaving the keyboard now to go start supper and praying for a better night of computing tonight!

4 comments:

Gene Bach said...

Remember...computers are our friends. They are here to help us. LOL! I have OFTEN wanted to beat my computer to death.

Shelby said...

happy Thursday :)

TomCat said...

Jeni, you're certainly having more trouble with XP than most on a new computer. If something in XP is off, the more stuff you add to it, the more likely it is to blow up. Try not to add so much so fast, and each time you have a configuration that stays stable for a few hours, set a new system restore point so you can go back if the next change blows it up.

Anonymous said...

I find that percussive maintenance works best. The larger the hammer, the more it listens.