Monday, April 28, 2014

And once again

more gripes!

Well - a few anyway.  Like number one on my list, and it seems to get there often - computers!   My baby refurbed computer is basically dead.  I had been having trouble for some time, and Friday it shuddered into a coma.  This is my computer that is (supposed) to live upstairs in the craft room and be the caretaker of my embroidery design files.  Well - being a itty-bitty laptop, it will get thrown into the computer bag to travel to the SSB.  Who knows, I might actually work on getting all those files FILED!

So I finally was upstairs after almost a month to work on a shirt I did for the daughter of a friend.  I was learning a new technique.  I was trying to transfer six months of designs onto that computer, and I couldn't keep it from shutting itself down.  I know that is a characteristic of that little thing even in good health, but I was very frustrated with it.  So Saturday I got it "going" pretty much, and then suddenly it shut itself down again (as I was trying to load the designs from the thumb drive), and would just show me two of its little lights when I tried to boot it.

So it needs a computer doctor. 

I went to get the Dell.  It was supposedly repaired back in December.  I get an error message with these horrible words : cannot find hard drive."  What??  That's the most important thing on that computer.  But I didn't let that deter me.  I pushed on.

When I lost my pictures when the Dell was dropped in Alaska, I swore I would never let something like that happen again.  It happened because I was just too lax to stop and back up things.  So a couple of months ago, I subscribed to a Cloud service.  I went to the cloud to download those things that were on the baby to the Dell.  Kept getting the error message, but I persevered. 

It was taking eons, so I just left it to download.  When I returned, there was a black screen with some kind of message that I don't remember.  Basically, it was that there was no hard drive.  I just rebooted, and my welcome screen was back. 

My plans are to use the Dell as the computer there until I can take the baby to a new, "private" repair guy (whom I should have used when I had the Dell repaired from the jokers I did use).  Then I will, if I like him, take the Dell to be checked, and finally this new one that the joker did something to so that I get a kind of blue-screen of death.

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The reason I had to let the baby sit so long with nothing going on was that our wonderful (not) Uverse was out - again.  This time when it went out, so did the phone and the computer since we have a bundle.

I really thought my craft room was going to be safe from the technician coming in, but no.   One of my Facebook groups is a machine embroidery one.  Ladies all over the world have been sharing their craft room pictures, and I know that mine is really not the worst.  In fact, I showed a lot of the worst ones to G so he would realize.  But no - the guy had to visit me three times.

When I turned on the set up there, it said I was off line for my DVRed programs.  That. Is. Not. Acceptable.  Fortunately he was just outside and could come in to fix it.  Then when (and this is choice irony) ATT called, our phones wouldn't ring because they didn't work.  With Uverse, you can have the caller ID on the screen.

So this time we had to call him.  He didn't hook up a line to the modem that controls everything.  SO disaster averted on that front.  I know it really goes against the tech if you call the company back.  My son works for the company.  The guy was really great though.  He replaced the remotes that Clyde chewed up, and the ones that I replaced with $9 universals I bought from Amazon!

So that was the end of my week and you are up to date.  I know you will all breathe more easily now.

2 comments:

Judy said...

Computers are supposed to work flawlessly and when they don't--it drives me nuts too! I gotta get some kind of back-up program!!!

yellowdoggranny said...

I just freak out when I have problems with mine....