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MY COMPUTER NEEDS COFFEE 23 January 2015 My new desktop should have been delivered to my guru yesterday so I suppose it's only a matter of time before my frustrations have to do with learning a new system and not with coaxing along a doddering old laptop that is trying to keep up with me, but is really on its last legs. When I bought this laptop, Vista had just come out and I knew of the problems with that operating system and wanted to stick with XP. Fry's found one reconditioned Toshiba that still had XP and I bought that. I have been very happy with it all these years. I only use it when we travel, so I can continue to write Funny the World using the Front Page program and not have to do it in code (because I'm lazy). I can do it in code if necessary, fortunately. But the machine is old and riddled with viruses. It regularly gives me error messages saying that a certain script has stopped working and giving me the option of letting it continue to try to run, debugging the script or stopping the script. I have found that the only option it will actually let me use is stopping the script, so I do that. But when I'm dealing with that, the machine is locked up for 5 minutes or so. Many times throughout the day. The biggest problem, however, is that if you let it sit for a few hours, or overnight especially, it takes forEVer to get it started. Yesterday I got up at 3 a.m. to write my entry, since I'd fallen asleep watching a movie, waiting for Walt to get home, and just stumbled off to the couch to sleep instead of writing it then. When I got up and got the computer started, it immediately got the script error message. I was able to click on "stop script" and timed it. It took fifteen minutes before the screen finally shut down. In the morning everything is slow. I am both a night person and a morning person and when my feet hit the floor in the morning, I am ready and raring to go, especially when I know I have conked out the night before and never got an entry written. But the computer needs to yawn and stretch and scratch and I don't know whatever computers do when they are waking up. And then about 10 or 15 or 20 minutes into my attempts to coddle it to please give me this screen, it starts to come to life. It will give me the screen I'm trying to use, but it won't let me use it. It just sits there taunting me with a cursor that won't move and a program waiting for me, silently, mocking me. It's like it used to be trying to start Walt's old Rambler. You find a nice incline and try to get it rolling fast enough that you can start the engine and then eventually, when it feels good and ready, it finally roars to life. As I sat here trying to wait out the script errors and the frozen screens, praying that it will give me just a few more days service until the desktop is back, I was thinking that what this machine needs in the morning is a good stiff cup of very strong coffee to jolt it awake. As soon as I get the new desktop (well as
soon as I feel comfortable using it), this baby is going back to the guru,
praying that he can debug it so I can still use it for awhile, because when
it is good, it is very good and the last thing I want to do is pay more
money for another laptop that won't run the software I need it to! |
PHOTO OF THE DAY
From a book I found at Logos today |
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This is entry #5411
