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Crunchy CrasholaJuly 08, 2010 So a week ago last Sunday, June 27 by my reckoning, Morgana V woke up with a big headache: the blue screen of "one of your key system files is corrupt or missing." This made it my headache, because I had to reinstall Windows and most of my software. Well, it had been 14 months since the last sinking of the Mary Ellen Carter, so I was ready to suck it up and rise again, so I did. The problem didn't become apparent till I tried to update my AVG the next day. Connection speed topped out at a whopping 2 Kbps. Seriously. I hadn't seen a transmission speed that slow since my little 14.4 Kbps external modem, or maybe the palm-size one whose speed was even slower. Back in those days I wasn't trying to download multi-megabyte files so it didn't seem all that slow. This AVG update should have been done in a very few minutes but it went on for hours, many, many hours, during which, fascinated, I occasionally looked at the connection speed: 1.6 Kbps, 1.4, 1.2 . . . After six or seven hours, when the file was maybe two-thirds downloaded, Windows had a mini-crash and all was lost. The next morning Outlook Express couldn't find either comcast.net .or gis.net, which is to say I couldn't send or receive e-mail, and Internet Explorer had no better luck finding the World Wide Web. My cable modem seemed to be functioning fine, and so was my phone. Morgana V, however, was like a telepath who's lost her powers, and without Morgana, I am like a blind woman who's lost both her dog and her cane. I'll spare you the gory details, aside from the essentials: Comcast was helpful throughout, even though it wasn't their problem. I cancelled the first technician because I was 98% sure it wasn't a Comcast problem, but on the other hand, why was everything else working, sludgily, true, but it was working. Mark the technician solved the conundrum yesterday: Something went wonky during the crash or the reinstall, and the folder that's supposed to be called Network Applications is now listed in Windows Explorer as Unknown, and Morgana can't access it. Every afternoon I've been trucking over to Cris's house to use her computer -- download e-mail, transact business on the web, and copy clients' files from hard drive to CD or vice versa. Being an "If it ain't broke . . ." kind of girl, I'd been thinking for years of getting a laptop: being so computer-dependent and having only one computer is risky, but for 25 years bad things have happened seldom and generally been fixed PDQ. Not this time. So I did my research and finally ordered myself a Dell Inspiron. (I was already to order a Toshiba, but their website drove me nuts, so I defaulted to my second choice.) It arrived today. Now I'm trying to get acquainted on the fly with Windows 7, Firefox, Thunderbird, and Office 2010, and especially with the touchpad on the computer. (The external mouse I ordered also arrived today but I haven't plugged it in yet, partly because I've discovered the joys of sitting out on the deck in the early evening, reading e-mail on battery power.) Outlook Express has apparently been left in the cyber dust, which is too bad because it and I have gotten along fine through several ISP providers. Trying to get MS Outlook set up with my two POP e-mail accounts proved frustrating and unsuccessful, which is why I downloaded the two Mozillas. Persuading Thunderbird to communicate with comcast.net and gis.net was also challenging, but at about five minutes to six about 140 e-mails cascaded into my inbox. Whew. Something I've noticed in the computer world: When people claim to have made things easier for the average user, I almost always have more problems with the new improved one than with the old. I must be in the cyber-DMZ between knowing too much and knowing too little. Average user probably doesn't have an e-mail account where the incoming and outgoing servers are different. Outlook Express had no trouble accommodating this. Both Outlook and Thunderbird searched for the server based on my e-mail address and choked when smtp.gis.net didn't work for outgoing e-mail. Their "configure manually" option was cagey about where to put my incoming/outgoing info. It took at least a dozen failed test transmissions before I got it right, and I'm still not sure how I did it, but it's done. Oh yeah, I also bought and set up a wireless router, which is why I can sit out on the deck and download e-mail with no wires in sight. This is cool -- literally, because it's been very hot and humid the last few days and in the early evening outside is more pleasant than in, even though David finally finished installing my new ceiling fan just before July got beastly. Next step is to get a diagnosis on Morgana -- can this computer be saved, or, more accurately, how much is it going to cost to get her up to something like her old speed, and restore my Network Applications? I may have a new desktop in my near future too. There's probably a word for people who buy two new computers and a car in the same calendar year, but I don't know what it is. |
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