fingers crossed
I'm now on round 3 with this laptop after two complete system restores. This hasn't been going well. There have been software incompatibilities, a raging trojan infection, and peculiar behavior from supposedly compatible software. Also Windows 7 doesn't act like I expect it to act, which has resulted in files unexpectedly disappearing and others getting lost in the shuffle.
I've been searching online to answer questions, such as how to get the machine to recognize me as an administrator, to stop throwing warnings and threats at me every time I try to do something. How to get it to stop demanding that I log in over and over, every time I reboot (which I've had to do constantly). Also how to get McAfee behave itself (an ongoing issue with no apparent resolution).
I have now used the tech support "web chat" feature from three different places. I'd never used one of these before, so that's been interesting. (Those people type insanely fast without any typos--that's . . . pretty impressive. Or maybe they're using voice software. I don't know.)
Windows 7 despises some of my older software. E.g., it seems to be okay with Paintshop Pro, TextPad, and VUPlayer, but my version of Acrobat Pro is barely functional. For my email, I didn't want to reinstall cranky Eudora 8 OSE (i.e., Thunderbird in Eudora packaging), but my Eudora 7 attempt kept tossing errors I didn't know how to deal with. So, after spending way, way too much time reading about other email clients (and learning that online mail services have killed this arm of the software industry -- hardly anyone sells/supports email clients now), I wound up backtracking even farther. I downloaded and installed Eudora 6.2 from 2005. Since the company has abandoned the software, all the registration info is free on the forum. Win7 hates 6.2 just as much as it did 7.0 and refuses to recognize it as my default client; even so, the software does function. I just needed some assistance from my host server's tech support department to get the fiddly settings right. (This time I took screenshots of the settings and tucked them away. IIRC, I always used to have this problem getting all Eudora's settings fixed, so nothing new there.)
This has been a blast from the past. I remember now how much I liked this client. Also, this version introduced the "Mood Watch" feature -- when people began cursing on the mailing list expressly to get Eudora to mark their posts with chili peppers. :P
Another unexpected hurdle was getting my macros installed in Word. It refused to recognize them, and after some mulling over the help files, I hauled out the Word installation disk and picked an Office feature I'd skipped the first time around. Bingo, solved. The macros loaded at last. While I was at it, I pasted in a few extra routines that I'd found via Google into my cleanup macro, which should should save me a bit more time. Woot. :D
Trying to round up more compatible versions of some of my older stuff meant I had to pay to upgrade and/or rebuy some from scratch. This led to my credit card being suspended, which I didn't realize until I tried to put more time on the cell phone and the charge was refused. So I had to call the credit card company to find out what was going on.
She: You tried to make a purchase from a company in the Netherlands.
Me: Oh. Yeah, software. So I guess that's why it wouldn't let me buy it . . .
She: Did you realize it was in Europe?
Me: Uh. No. But it doesn't surprise me. Lots of smaller software companies are based there.
She: You have to be careful about buying things from Europe.
Me: Uh.
She: In the future, you need to call 24 hours in advance and tell us that you're going to charge something from a European company. We'll place a notice on your file for 48 hours so that the charge will clear.
Me: Seriously?
She: Yes.
So. Europe is louche now? Yet they didn't seem to have an issue with Amazon.uk.
Oh, and I completely killed my Internet connection at one point, and had to call tech support on the phone to be talked through reviving my dead DSL modem.
Anyhoo, I think third time was the charm. Everything seems to be working. For now. Maybe. So I did need the entire week I'd set aside for this, and it's been . . . stressful.
We took off at ungodly a.m. to pick up the niece creature at the airport. As it turned out, my sister really did want to go, so we wound up leaving my car in Anderson at the school, going to Indy in her car, then going back to the school to drop her off while I kept going in her car with the creature and her many large baggages.
The new airport's really, really big. It was also really, really empty as the creature's plane was the first arrival of the day at 5:30 am. At any rate, it has rather ugly "public art" that I didn't much admire -- like these red canvas thingies suspended from the parking garage roof.
She: They're supposed to rotate in the breeze.
Me: They're not rotating.
She: No.
Me: That one looks like it has eyes. Doesn't it look like it has eyes?
She: Oh. It does, doesn't it?
Me: It's looking at us. That is fucking creepy.
She: Yeah. It really is.
The walkway from the parking garage to the airport has a rolling belt thing, and the ceiling has these round panels that light up in different colors and make terrible sounds as people move underneath them. My sister didn't warn me of this on purpose, so when I hopped on the ramp and the ceiling went BLORP! BLEEERG PONK! I shrieked a little -- I thought I'd set off some bizarre security thing.
The central area has a window wall on one side where you can watch the planes, though it was dark outside and only one plane was moving -- the one the creature was on, sidling up to dump its passengers. Also on the other side of those windows was a lower walkway where the people who've been through security can walk back and forth in their own area, separated from everyone else. You can peer down at them in their habitat.
Me: Wow, this is like the Andromeda Strain, isn't it?
She: I hadn't been thinking that.
Me: Well?
She: And now I am.
I also watched people going through security for a while; they were shuffling along in these penned rows while uniformed people in latex gloves were strolling free around them.
The whole place reminded me vaguely of scifi movies.
They also have benches over by the baggage claim that look exactly like stacked suitcases. I thought they were stacked suitcases until my sister explained otherwise. So while I was trying to decide whether I wanted to go sit on one (just because! :), my sister busted out in a loud rant: "That's so disgusting, they shouldn't be doing that in public. No one should have to look at that." There was only a handful of people in the entire area, all of them off the flight the creature had come in on, and I must have been looking as confused as I felt, 'cause the creature said, "She means those two chicks macking on each other over there." "Who? Where?" "Lean over."
Ah. Over on the other side of a baggage belt, blocked from my view by a support column, two girls were indeed making out. I'm very grateful to them, 'cause my sister in full-on Scandalized Oldster mode won for hilarity.
So I delivered the creature to my mom's house and went home to collapse. (Also: my sister informs me that the "puffy fur thing" hanging off my car's keychain is "gross" and the tiger toy with the laser eyes is "creepy." :)
I've been searching online to answer questions, such as how to get the machine to recognize me as an administrator, to stop throwing warnings and threats at me every time I try to do something. How to get it to stop demanding that I log in over and over, every time I reboot (which I've had to do constantly). Also how to get McAfee behave itself (an ongoing issue with no apparent resolution).
I have now used the tech support "web chat" feature from three different places. I'd never used one of these before, so that's been interesting. (Those people type insanely fast without any typos--that's . . . pretty impressive. Or maybe they're using voice software. I don't know.)
Windows 7 despises some of my older software. E.g., it seems to be okay with Paintshop Pro, TextPad, and VUPlayer, but my version of Acrobat Pro is barely functional. For my email, I didn't want to reinstall cranky Eudora 8 OSE (i.e., Thunderbird in Eudora packaging), but my Eudora 7 attempt kept tossing errors I didn't know how to deal with. So, after spending way, way too much time reading about other email clients (and learning that online mail services have killed this arm of the software industry -- hardly anyone sells/supports email clients now), I wound up backtracking even farther. I downloaded and installed Eudora 6.2 from 2005. Since the company has abandoned the software, all the registration info is free on the forum. Win7 hates 6.2 just as much as it did 7.0 and refuses to recognize it as my default client; even so, the software does function. I just needed some assistance from my host server's tech support department to get the fiddly settings right. (This time I took screenshots of the settings and tucked them away. IIRC, I always used to have this problem getting all Eudora's settings fixed, so nothing new there.)
This has been a blast from the past. I remember now how much I liked this client. Also, this version introduced the "Mood Watch" feature -- when people began cursing on the mailing list expressly to get Eudora to mark their posts with chili peppers. :P
Another unexpected hurdle was getting my macros installed in Word. It refused to recognize them, and after some mulling over the help files, I hauled out the Word installation disk and picked an Office feature I'd skipped the first time around. Bingo, solved. The macros loaded at last. While I was at it, I pasted in a few extra routines that I'd found via Google into my cleanup macro, which should should save me a bit more time. Woot. :D
Trying to round up more compatible versions of some of my older stuff meant I had to pay to upgrade and/or rebuy some from scratch. This led to my credit card being suspended, which I didn't realize until I tried to put more time on the cell phone and the charge was refused. So I had to call the credit card company to find out what was going on.
She: You tried to make a purchase from a company in the Netherlands.
Me: Oh. Yeah, software. So I guess that's why it wouldn't let me buy it . . .
She: Did you realize it was in Europe?
Me: Uh. No. But it doesn't surprise me. Lots of smaller software companies are based there.
She: You have to be careful about buying things from Europe.
Me: Uh.
She: In the future, you need to call 24 hours in advance and tell us that you're going to charge something from a European company. We'll place a notice on your file for 48 hours so that the charge will clear.
Me: Seriously?
She: Yes.
So. Europe is louche now? Yet they didn't seem to have an issue with Amazon.uk.
Oh, and I completely killed my Internet connection at one point, and had to call tech support on the phone to be talked through reviving my dead DSL modem.
Anyhoo, I think third time was the charm. Everything seems to be working. For now. Maybe. So I did need the entire week I'd set aside for this, and it's been . . . stressful.
We took off at ungodly a.m. to pick up the niece creature at the airport. As it turned out, my sister really did want to go, so we wound up leaving my car in Anderson at the school, going to Indy in her car, then going back to the school to drop her off while I kept going in her car with the creature and her many large baggages.
The new airport's really, really big. It was also really, really empty as the creature's plane was the first arrival of the day at 5:30 am. At any rate, it has rather ugly "public art" that I didn't much admire -- like these red canvas thingies suspended from the parking garage roof.
She: They're supposed to rotate in the breeze.
Me: They're not rotating.
She: No.
Me: That one looks like it has eyes. Doesn't it look like it has eyes?
She: Oh. It does, doesn't it?
Me: It's looking at us. That is fucking creepy.
She: Yeah. It really is.
The walkway from the parking garage to the airport has a rolling belt thing, and the ceiling has these round panels that light up in different colors and make terrible sounds as people move underneath them. My sister didn't warn me of this on purpose, so when I hopped on the ramp and the ceiling went BLORP! BLEEERG PONK! I shrieked a little -- I thought I'd set off some bizarre security thing.
The central area has a window wall on one side where you can watch the planes, though it was dark outside and only one plane was moving -- the one the creature was on, sidling up to dump its passengers. Also on the other side of those windows was a lower walkway where the people who've been through security can walk back and forth in their own area, separated from everyone else. You can peer down at them in their habitat.
Me: Wow, this is like the Andromeda Strain, isn't it?
She: I hadn't been thinking that.
Me: Well?
She: And now I am.
I also watched people going through security for a while; they were shuffling along in these penned rows while uniformed people in latex gloves were strolling free around them.
The whole place reminded me vaguely of scifi movies.
They also have benches over by the baggage claim that look exactly like stacked suitcases. I thought they were stacked suitcases until my sister explained otherwise. So while I was trying to decide whether I wanted to go sit on one (just because! :), my sister busted out in a loud rant: "That's so disgusting, they shouldn't be doing that in public. No one should have to look at that." There was only a handful of people in the entire area, all of them off the flight the creature had come in on, and I must have been looking as confused as I felt, 'cause the creature said, "She means those two chicks macking on each other over there." "Who? Where?" "Lean over."
Ah. Over on the other side of a baggage belt, blocked from my view by a support column, two girls were indeed making out. I'm very grateful to them, 'cause my sister in full-on Scandalized Oldster mode won for hilarity.
So I delivered the creature to my mom's house and went home to collapse. (Also: my sister informs me that the "puffy fur thing" hanging off my car's keychain is "gross" and the tiger toy with the laser eyes is "creepy." :)