Saturday, March 27, 2010

Computer h - e - double hockey sticks

Oh Lord, I have been up to my eyeballs in computer woes the last couple of days!  And - YAY - fixed it all myself by chucking Windows Vista for Windows 7 (something I should have done long ago).

(Mind you, I very nearly chucked Windows period for a Macbook.  Sticker shock led me to try being a little more conservative.)

I even resorted to an HP mini yesterday in desperation to try to manage my online business and continue to research the multitudes of cascading computer issues I had going on (which wasn't a bad investment at all - and one I'd been planning on making anyway).

I don't know that I'll be eternally happy with Windows 7, but let me give you a glimpse into my life with Vista.

First hour of the day.  Blue screen of death.  Disk check.  See  what the error was once my desktop FINALLY comes back up.  I need Service Pack 1.  Why don't I already have that?  Go to install.  Install.  Install.  Install.  Error.  SP1 won't install.  Oh, that's way.

Second hour.  Some type of service stops functioning.  Great.  Firefox crashes.  This will be the first of 20 Firefox crashes today.  Run Norton, just to see what's going on.  Nothing much.  Fix a couple of little things. 

Step away from computer for awhile.  Come back.  Wait the five to 10 minutes for it to work (this isn't even two years old yet).  Oh joy.  Blue screen of death.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Mind you, I'm increasingly unhappy with my once beloved Dell Inspiron, as well.  Major issues with touchpad and now keyboard also.  Yay.

SO, copied every last one of my personal and business files to a new 2 TB (wooey!) external hard drive yesterday/last night, after I could no longer download files from the internet (at all - disappeared immediately on download and the online documentation I was finding on this wasn't looking good - knew from  unsuccessful attempts to fix this that I was going to be reinstalling Vista).

Spent the next 18 hours trying to reinstall Vista.  Come to find out, Vista sometimes has a "black screen of death," so to say, on install/reinstall, and that was what I was getting.  HOURS of my life wasted, finally off to Fry's - again - for Windows 7.

Oh, Microsoft, you so very nearly lost me to Apple today.  The siren song of the powerbooks at the back of Fry's was very alluring ...

So, other than a twitchy keyboard and touchpad (knock on wood), things seem to be OK so far ...

4 comments:

Lynn Lunger said...

Oh Brenda, I feel for you. :^(

Computers make life so much more interesting and easy, but when things go wrong......argggggggggh!

Macs are great but not foolproof. I lost everything last summer when my Mac HD crashed. There one minute, gone the next. Couldn't retrieve a thing.

Hope today goes smoother for you!

Brenda said...

One blue screen of death this morning ... Nooooo! Have to find out what the deal is.

Even macs! Oy.

Summer said...

Hey Brenda...if you still have problems, try Linux (open source = free and it's nice there are people out there sharing talents for free).

I've also heard, from reliable sources, that Mac laptops often last only a couple years...that has certainly been the case for a good friend of mine. Pretty (oh, pretty), but costly.

Brenda said...

I totally agree on the macs, Summer - they're more reliable machines while they function, but they're not meant to last for more than a couple of years, so that you have to continue to upgrade (same for PCs, I suppose - it's just less expensive to upgrade a PC!).