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anne_dI think that's the expression...
Oh, bugger,what a week. First, Emily got the weepies, which did not set well with my PMS HellGoddess shorttemperedness.
Then on Monday afternoon the computer froze up and could not be fixed, so we rushed it to our repair place, literally minutes before they closed. Emily was inconsolable (I suspect she irrationally blamed herself), which shows a damn lot of nerve considering that she could use the computers at school, whereas Kitty and I were completely cut off from the interworld.
The repair guy kept working, and working, and working, and working - it turned out that our lovely Norton Antivirus wasn't so antivirusy - we had a Trojan horse devouring our memory, and I think Shawn mentioned at least one virus as well. He has no opinion of Norton; it used to work, but not much anymore. He sold us something called Avast! instead.
Tuesday night, we took Kitty to the Brea library, where she got her own library card and we both used the public computers for a few minutes. It wasn't nearly enough.
Last night, the computer was finally ready, $254 later. I have a list of five new cleanup and protective softwares to be run at various intervals throughout each month. The only one I'm even remotely familiar with now is good old AdAware, although now it's the pro version (I've gone pro, hee). I'm not so pleased that Shawn removed the on-button cover; yes, the spring doesn't work anymore, but we were used to it. I'm going to improvise a clear acrylic cover with a little hole we can stick a pencil through to push the button, as we Do Not Want any more openings for cat hair.
Anyway, we got it home, hooked it up, and found that as Emily had suspected from the first, the mouse had ceased to be. Frantic phone calls to Shawn the repair guy ensued. Advised by Shawn, Paul went to Best Buy and found a mouse that was (a) wired and (b) not made to run on Vista (Shawn has no opinion of Vista either, although he thinks it'll work by next year, maybe).
I'm still finding things that need tweaking. So far, I've gotten the Google toolbar back by myself, and with phone assistance from Shawn the wonder repair guy, turned off the mega popup blocker he gave us; it's a fearsome thing, it closes any browser window with multiple exclamation points anywhere in the text, which means eBay shuts suddenly and makes Kitty's Tokyo Mew Mew forum almost impossible to read at all. The Google toolbar popup blocker works just fine, thank you.
He also helped me turn off the automatic update notice until he can figure out why automatic updates aren't installing. It's not just our computer, it's all of them he's working on, so he has to wait for a fix. We'll be hearing from him eventually. We're going to have to reinstall the scanner software, as apparently that went in one of the cleanings, but at least I found the CDs for it. So no scanner or HP image stuff until that's fixed (and I'm making Paul do it), but we can still upload photos to PaintShopPro, which is what Emily does anyway, and I'll do that too.
On the plus side, it's running like a scalded, um, demon, and we are able to run things we couldn't run before, like some of the features on Gaia.
Emily is less weepy, at least, and she dissected the old mouse (full of crumbs and cat hair) and took interesting artistic pictures of the circuit board. I, on the other hand, have been too stressed to eat, which is unusual for me, and have lost four pounds. Which, while nice, is not a weight-loss system I'd recommend to anyone sane. If I'm careful and don't start binging instead, I might even keep some of them off. That'd be nice.
And it's only Thursday, and this is a long holiday weekend coming up, with predicted highs in the 90s here and 100s further inland. Maybe I should run away from home.
Oh, yes, and there's this - my best friend and I email each other during the day, every working day. While the PC was in the shop, we had to sneak phone calls on her breaks. So this morning, I emailed Daria to let her know I was back online. Several hours later, she called me. Her computer at work is dead, dead, dead, it has cocked up its toes and gone to join the choir invisible. Someone from IT was going to come and put it out of its misery, but for now, WE STILL CAN'T EMAIL EACH OTHER! Curses, curses!
Anne, also, my small store of creative energy has gone down the rabbithole with my sleep, it appears
Oh, bugger,what a week. First, Emily got the weepies, which did not set well with my PMS HellGoddess shorttemperedness.
Then on Monday afternoon the computer froze up and could not be fixed, so we rushed it to our repair place, literally minutes before they closed. Emily was inconsolable (I suspect she irrationally blamed herself), which shows a damn lot of nerve considering that she could use the computers at school, whereas Kitty and I were completely cut off from the interworld.
The repair guy kept working, and working, and working, and working - it turned out that our lovely Norton Antivirus wasn't so antivirusy - we had a Trojan horse devouring our memory, and I think Shawn mentioned at least one virus as well. He has no opinion of Norton; it used to work, but not much anymore. He sold us something called Avast! instead.
Tuesday night, we took Kitty to the Brea library, where she got her own library card and we both used the public computers for a few minutes. It wasn't nearly enough.
Last night, the computer was finally ready, $254 later. I have a list of five new cleanup and protective softwares to be run at various intervals throughout each month. The only one I'm even remotely familiar with now is good old AdAware, although now it's the pro version (I've gone pro, hee). I'm not so pleased that Shawn removed the on-button cover; yes, the spring doesn't work anymore, but we were used to it. I'm going to improvise a clear acrylic cover with a little hole we can stick a pencil through to push the button, as we Do Not Want any more openings for cat hair.
Anyway, we got it home, hooked it up, and found that as Emily had suspected from the first, the mouse had ceased to be. Frantic phone calls to Shawn the repair guy ensued. Advised by Shawn, Paul went to Best Buy and found a mouse that was (a) wired and (b) not made to run on Vista (Shawn has no opinion of Vista either, although he thinks it'll work by next year, maybe).
I'm still finding things that need tweaking. So far, I've gotten the Google toolbar back by myself, and with phone assistance from Shawn the wonder repair guy, turned off the mega popup blocker he gave us; it's a fearsome thing, it closes any browser window with multiple exclamation points anywhere in the text, which means eBay shuts suddenly and makes Kitty's Tokyo Mew Mew forum almost impossible to read at all. The Google toolbar popup blocker works just fine, thank you.
He also helped me turn off the automatic update notice until he can figure out why automatic updates aren't installing. It's not just our computer, it's all of them he's working on, so he has to wait for a fix. We'll be hearing from him eventually. We're going to have to reinstall the scanner software, as apparently that went in one of the cleanings, but at least I found the CDs for it. So no scanner or HP image stuff until that's fixed (and I'm making Paul do it), but we can still upload photos to PaintShopPro, which is what Emily does anyway, and I'll do that too.
On the plus side, it's running like a scalded, um, demon, and we are able to run things we couldn't run before, like some of the features on Gaia.
Emily is less weepy, at least, and she dissected the old mouse (full of crumbs and cat hair) and took interesting artistic pictures of the circuit board. I, on the other hand, have been too stressed to eat, which is unusual for me, and have lost four pounds. Which, while nice, is not a weight-loss system I'd recommend to anyone sane. If I'm careful and don't start binging instead, I might even keep some of them off. That'd be nice.
And it's only Thursday, and this is a long holiday weekend coming up, with predicted highs in the 90s here and 100s further inland. Maybe I should run away from home.
Oh, yes, and there's this - my best friend and I email each other during the day, every working day. While the PC was in the shop, we had to sneak phone calls on her breaks. So this morning, I emailed Daria to let her know I was back online. Several hours later, she called me. Her computer at work is dead, dead, dead, it has cocked up its toes and gone to join the choir invisible. Someone from IT was going to come and put it out of its misery, but for now, WE STILL CAN'T EMAIL EACH OTHER! Curses, curses!
Anne, also, my small store of creative energy has gone down the rabbithole with my sleep, it appears