I’m Just Sharing

After literally 12 hours of effort, I finally got my computer back up and running. Truthfully, I’m not sure what did it, but I’m going to detail what went on, which may give information to others who might go through this problem.

What started it all was my trying to get my scanner to work. It just wasn’t having it, and it wouldn’t run with either of the utilities are are supposed to scan items, those being Microsoft Photo Editor, my editor of choice, or its own toolbar; I have a Canon scanner. So, I did what I thought was the logical step; I uninstalled the drivers for the scanner so I could load them again after the reboot.

Okay, the reboot never stopped rebooting. At first I actually just let it go, thinking it would right itself, but that wasn’t going to happen. I then booted up in safe mode to see if I could determine what was going on; nope. I tried loading the Canon program back there, then rebooted the computer again; same issue.

I started trying to think of anything else I’d done since the last reboot. I’ve still been having major problems with the computer shutting down, and I thought I’d traced it to a HID compliance issue (human interface device, used to describe wireless hardware such as keyboards and mice) by adding some files to my computer that I’d gotten from others. That problem didn’t resolve itself, but I’d rebooted after that and the computer came back just fine.

Actually, saying my computer was coming back just fine is a misnomer. For the past week or so, any time I tried to reboot, the computer would hang and just not get it done. But if I rebooted a second time, or if I shut down the computer completely then started it back up, everything was fine. So, there were problems on the horizon.

Anyway, I kept going through the stages of booting and rebooting the regular way and through safe mode, even signing on as administrator, and nothing was working. Then I decided to try to run the Win XP repair option. When I’d accidentally erased my files before, I was actually trying to run a repair instead, but hit the wrong key and ended up doing a full reinstall. With the repair option, and I’m not talking about the Repair Recovery Console, you can have Windows repair itself, almost like a full install because it takes about as much time, but it doesn’t touch those all important Documents and Settings files, which contains all your data files, including your email files. I first had to go into the BIOS and change the boot option so it would look for the CD first, and away I went.

For the uninformed, after Windows loads all its files, it gives you some options. One allows you to hit R to go to recovery; don’t do that if you’re not close to being an expert. More on that one later. Instead, hit ENTER, which looks like you’re going to install, but you’re not at this point. What happens is you’ll come to the next screen where it will give you the option of either repairing or doing a clean install. This is where you hit the “R“. From this point on, you just let Windows do its thing, answering questions as needed, but here’s a very important point: Do NOT do any of this if you don’t have an installation key number! Oh, one more thing. After the install, when the computer reboots for the second time, you’ll want to go back into BIOS and change the boot order back to hard drive, and of course take out the XP CD.

Going on with the story, during the first repair process, suddenly it stopped and was looking for a particular video file. I don’t know why it wasn’t already on my computer, but it wasn’t. I had to go through the process of locating the driver on my laptop, then copying it over to a blank CD (I used a rewritable disk) and putting it into my computer. Of course, things never go easy for me, so it couldn’t find the file. I ended up having to reboot the computer, and when it came back it started the repair process again, but when it came to the file this time and I put the CD in, it found the file. Of course a few minutes later it needed another file, and I had to go back to the laptop and repeat that process, and of course I then had to reboot the computer and start the repair process again. Once it finally had both files, I was good to go.

Or so I thought. Once the repair process was completed, I started the computer again, and it kept rebooting itself; arrgh! I ended up running the full repair process again, just to make sure that it was done properly, especially with what I had to go through with those two files, and this time it ran perfectly.

Good to go again, right; nope! Still was stuck in some kind of loop. Also, it kept flashing a blue screen message, but it was so fast that I couldn’t read it. So I had to boot up in safe mode and go into the My Computer settings to turn that off. I then rebooted the computer, and finally, even though it didn’t boot up, it stopped on the error message so I at least had a chance to see what was going on. I saw the error message and headed to the internet on my laptop. It indicated that there was a possibility that I might have a virus. Oh yeah; you can always type in your error messages, but someone else might not have typed in exactly what your problem is. However, the first two lines of the code will usually get you somewhere close to what your issue might be. I went to McAfee’s site for its Stinger program, which will scan your computer for the latest viruses without your having to load an entire program.

Before I went through this entire process, though, I suddenly thought about opening a restore point and going back to a date when the computer was running fine. Of course, turns out I didn’t have one. Figures, because a few days ago I was thinking I should go in and create a restore point; always follow your first thought.

I booted the computer again in safe mode, then this time I ran the Stinger program. It didn’t find anything, so it wasn’t a virus. I also decided to run two other programs. I ran Error Doctor again, which I’d already run twice, then decided to run this program recommended by PC Magazine called Driver Sweeper, a free utility that cleans out bad drivers, mainly video and audio, but still, it was another check. Then, while I was at it, I decided to run Spybot, a program that looks for spyware and malware, and it found nothing. I also was going to try to run my free AVG program, but it wouldn’t work; odd. And, one final thing, I also installed Service Pack 3, which I’d already had downloaded; you never know when you’ll need those service packs.

At this point, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, but I decided to hedge my bet. I backed up all my data files from Documents and Settings, which includes all the My Documents files. I was prepared to run the full install if my computer didn’t boot up properly.

I hit reboot, then waited. And this time, the computer booted up all the way. When I heard that wonderful applause (instead of the normal Windows opening, I replaced the sound with applause; who wouldn’t enjoy being applauded more often?), I was ecstatic. I checked the time, and it was 3:35; I’d spent 12 hours and 21 minutes trying to get this to occur. I decided to just turn off the monitor at that point and get back to everything else later in the morning.

Once I came back, I turned on the monitor to see it ready for me to do something. I had to reload many Windows updates, including reinstalling Internet Explorer 7, but I didn’t care. What I cared about was whether the computer would reboot once all that stuff was installed. It did, and that part of the computer is working well once again; whew!

The one bad thing? The scanner still won’t scan. Hey, I’ll take what I can get!

Most people who use Firefox or Thunderbird know that they got those items from Mozilla. However, I’m betting most of you don’t know that there’s a Mozilla.com and a Mozilla.org, and that, though each of the sites has some kind of relationship with the other, they’re totally different sites.

Mozilla.com is where we all get Firefox and Thunderbird. They also have a store where you can purchase t-shirts and other clothing, and other items with the Mozilla “Firefox” logo on it.

Mozilla.org is where one can pick up news about what’s going on with Mozilla, including updates to Firefox and Mozilla, but it’s also where other software that Mozilla offers resides. For instance, there are two other browsers that they provide, one called Seamonkey and the other called Camino. Seamonkey is an all-in one application where one can do browsing, email, chatting and HTML coding; it reminds me of what the earliest versions of Netscape used to do. Camino is a browser meant for Mac users who want to experience what everyone else experiences with Firefox.

Two things I was interested in learning more about, one of which I have downloaded and now use, were Sunbird andLightning. Sunbird is a calendar application that works like Outlook, only more colorful. Lightning is actually more of a add-on that you can load into Thunderbird and it adds the calendar application right into that program. That turned out to be the one I wanted, so I downloaded it and installed it into my Thunderbird program, and was happy to discover that it also has a tasks list with it.

There are more things you can see on the second site, such as other projects the Mozilla Corporation is working on, and if you’re interested you can take a look. Happy viewing.

Palm(r) Treo(tm) 680

For about two weeks now I’ve been trying to figure out why Google Desktop wouldn’t index any of my email in Mozilla Thunderbird. I searched all over the place, and just couldn’t figure it out. I’ve finally figured it out, with some serious searching online and some testing on my own, and I’m going to tell you how I did it.

The first thing you do is close Thunderbird. The second thing you do is open up your Explorer window. Then go into your Program Files, Google, and then whatever is next; on my computer it’s Google Desktop Search, but on some computer it’s Google Desktop Directory. Once there, highlight whatever files you have that say “GoogleDesktopMozilla“; you probably won’t need them all, but copy them just in case. Then go to the Program Files for Mozilla Thunderbird, and paste whatever you can into the Components folder; if a file is already there, you don’t have to copy over it.

Then you go into your Thunderbird profile, which you access by C:\DocumentsandSettings\(username)\ApplicationData\Thunderbird\Profiles\(unique profile). Once there, delete a file called “compreg.dat“.

That’s it. Open up Thunderbird, and Google Desktop should start indexing your email files in the background. You can check it by opening it up to see if it says it’s indexing. If not, just start the indexing process. Of course, if you’re starting from the beginning, indexing could take a long time, which means while you’re doing things your computer might slow down. But I love Google Desktop, and if you do also, give this fix a shot.

And there you go. By the way, if it’s not indexing your Firefox files, you can do the same process, only go into Program Files and then Firefox.

Well, it looked like it was going to be touch and go there for awhile, but I got all my files back, and I’m a happy camper once more. I’m so happy that I’m promoting the product that helped me a second time, and it’s going to come highly recommended.

First, the story. When we last left, the Recover My Files program had been running for about 3 hours, and I had to get to bed. I woke this morning around 8:45 because, me being me, I dreamt about the program running all night. I was eager to see if it had found what I was looking for.

I was disappointed, but not for the reason you might think. The program showed it had been running over 8 1/2 hours, and it still wasn’t close to done. It had progressed, but it was going way too deep for my needs. I realized that I needed to stop the program and start it again, this time not having it search for certain types of files. With the program, you can tell it to look for things such as images and text files specifically and it’ll dig for them, but if you don’t need that stuff you can uncheck it, and it won’t bother with them. So I unchecked that stuff and all my MS Office stuff, since I’d found that elsewhere, and a few other things as well. I also then told the program to look for files only in Documents and Settings, because I knew that’s where all my information was. It only took five minutes this time, and when it was done, there were my files. It had renamed them .eml files, because I’d told it to look for email files, but I could handle that.

At that point I had to buy the program, and I did, because it had done its job. I loaded in the license name (I used my name, but could have used my email address) and license number, super long so I copied and pasted it, and then chose Save, and saved it to my external drive. What it did was save it in the folder setup that it originally was on my hard drive, which made it easy to know where I needed to reinstall those files. After running that I went back in and had it search for all my Feedreader files, of which there really was only two I needed, which contained all my feeds, since the laptop would have been deficient on that.

The next step was to open Thunderbird first and create a profile, because even though the program was still on my computer, it, as well as every other program, needed to be created as if it was brand new; I actually had to reload my Office software, and a couple other things, whereas some of the programs just made you start anew. Once I created a profile, I first had to go back to the laptop and move over the entire email profile from there so I could upload it onto the laptop. The reason for that is that I have 7 email accounts set up on Thunderbird, whereas the profile only had one. I could have created all 7 anew, but why do that when it’s easier to copy and paste?

So, after the copy and paste of the previous profile (only the information; you can’t overwrite a current profile name, otherwise Thunderbird will never find it), I went to the folder where the files had been saved, changed the extensions from .eml to nothing, since that’s the way they were in the new D&S folder, and moved everything over. Then I opened Thunderbird, holding my breath, but it was all there; whew! I did the same for Feedreader, moving over the two main files, and that all came back also.

And there you go. Right now, I’m running the main computer again, but for the present time I’m using the wired mouse and keyboard for awhile. Thus far six hours, plus the time I was asleep and had that other program running, and nothing has shut down yet. I just installed the printer and scanner again, both on USB ports, as I’m testing that theory for now, and everything is working just fine.

So, there’s two posts where I hope y’all have learned lessons from my mistakes. Time to go get something to eat, but before I do, I fully recommend Recover My Files, which is below:

Recover My Files Data Recovery Price $69.95

I like to think I’m a pretty smart guy. Things will be going along pretty well, and every once in awhile I start believing my own hype. Then something happens that brings me back to reality. Not that I’m not still smart, but that I just fall into some stupid patterns that are pretty stupid.

For those who have been regular readers, you know I had computer problems, and even wrote a couple of posts about the Computer Guy who did his piece, but unfortunately couldn’t get it to stop crashing on me. I’ve had these problems for years, but over the last couple of weeks it just started crashing more often, and earlier today, after it crashed the 4th time, I decided it was time for a reinstall of Windows XP. My thought was that it just might be a driver issue, and by reloading Windows I could start from scratch, loading only a few things at a time rather than everything at once, which I did before, to test things. Luckily, I have the laptop, which I’m writing this on, that I can use as my main computer while I do my testing.

I decided that I didn’t want to format my drive, which would have meant that I’d have had to back up my entire hard drive again. I did that before, and that’s a mess, so I knew I was going to just reinstall it over the present operating system. If you’ve never done this, you don’t lose your files, or at least most of your files. Anything in your Program Files, or any folders you created, including folders where you’ve loaded software, will be just fine.

So, as I started the process, I thought everything was going to be fine. Then I remembered that there were some sound files that I’d moved into the Windows media folder that I wanted to keep, so I stopped the process, went back into the computer, and moved those files. Then I started the process again. You get a warning that tells you it’s going to wipe all system files, and of course you have the choice to just do that or format the entire drive. I selected the first option, then went through the entire 39 minute process of reinstalling Windows.

When it was completed and started back up, I wasn’t troubled by what I saw, which was the original Windows XP screen, that cheesy clouds and grass thing, and only the recycle bin. It wasn’t until I opened Firefox that I realized there was a problem. It seems that the one area I totally forgot about was the Documents and Settings folders; uh oh. In XP, many of your data files are run through folders in that area, and that includes Firefox and IE. All were wiped out; I felt like a moron.

The lucky thing, I discovered, was that I had accidentally recopied all my original Firefox files into a file I’d named Mozilla, and I was able to recover all of them within a few minutes; whew, first tragedy averted. Then I opened Thunderbird for my email and realized I’d messed that up also. Unfortunately, I hadn’t backed those up again, so now I was stuck. I can move over some files that I have on the laptop, but I’m missing a month’s worth of email, including some financial files and passwords that I need; that’s started to freak me out.

But I wasn’t done being freaked out. I then realized that the My Documents folder is actually a part of Documents and Settings, even though it’s out on its own. So, that means I inadvertently deleted every single one of my data files, going back over 10 years. Now that was a real moron move. Yet, I figured I had taken care of that, because I had used the Windows utility to back up my files, and they’re sitting on my F drive, which is my external hard drive. That sounds good, right? Well, for some reason, the backup restore utility can’t find those files, which means I have no way of accessing any of them; what the hey?

Anyway, luckily this story isn’t over yet. We’ve been talking about Twitter a lot lately, actually in my last post, so I went to Twitter and just happened to mention in general what I’d done. One of the people following wrote me and mentioned a program that might still be able to recover files that were deleted from my hard drive. He even gave me the name of a program, though right now I’m running a different one than he mentioned because I happened to click on this link that had the name he gave me before he’d sent me the actual link to the program he was talking about. I’m going to save my talking about that one for another post, but I can tell you that, so far, it’s been running 3 hours, and is only about half way through my hard drive, but has found almost 145,000 files thus far. You get to run the program for free to see what it finds, but when it’s time for recovery I’ll have to pay for it. Hey, if it gets back my data files and email files, it’ll be worth it to pay for them.

And then, another act of serendipity occurred when, on a whim, I decided to look for one file in particular, and I found all my data files. Seems Windows must know that some people are morons, and it created a new folder in D&S called Computer, and in Computer are all my data files; yay! That’s a major lifesaver, because that will be the bulk of the files I was probably trying to recover, and therefore if the program allows me so many free files to retrieve I can now forget all about that data files and only concentrate on the email files.

So, as I said, I should know better. I’ve had everything backed up before, and I should have just gone ahead and done it this time. Frustration will make you do some stupid things at times. But also, it shows that you can get some great help by reaching out, even innocently. Let’s hope this all turns out just fine; I’ll know in the morning.

Oh yeah, I told you I wasn’t going to say the name; that doesn’t mean I’m not going to give a hint:

Recover My Files Data Recovery Price $69.95

For a couple of months, I’ve been looking at this blog page of mine with a little bit of consternation. Though I loved the theme, I had a problem with it. On Firefox it looked fine, but on Internet Explorer it looked terrible. Instead of looking like a 3-column theme, it looked like a 2-column theme with a major problem, as the column on the right side was dropping all the way to the bottom.

I looked at everything for a long time. I went through my posts looking for bad HTML code, and couldn’t find anything. I copied the code from the template into the program I use for creating websites and the like, and couldn’t find anything wrong. I put out questions to other people asking what they were seeing and if they had any ideas what the issue might be, and strangely enough, everyone else was seeing it properly, or so they were telling me. I was flabbergasted and, well, thought maybe I was losing my mind. I thought maybe there was something else wrong with my computer or my monitor initially also, except I was seeing the same thing on my laptop; strange.

So, once again last night I’m going through the entire site again, which takes a lot of time, trying to figure things out, knowing I was going to figure things out. I asked a few more people to look at the site, and was lucky to have one guy who I could talk to immediately; it was around 2AM after all, and he was in Australia, and he told me it was fine. Then suddenly, a thought hit my mind. I asked him which version of IE he was using; he told me IE7. The light bulb went off in my head; I was still on IE6.

There was a time in my life when I had to always have the latest and greatest of everything. When I was a kid, I always had the first of everything in my area. My family had the first color TV. I had the first cassette recorder. I had the first of what we used to call “banana” bikes. I actually had something that preceded 8-track tapes, and was the first to have it (if you don’t know what an 8-track tape is, go ask your parents). Among my friends, I had the first duo-floppy drive computer, the first 17″ monitor, the first external hard drive, the first (and only) Palm with an actual hard drive; okay, that last one was a major mistake, but still, I was ahead of the game.

But something happened as I’ve gotten older. I like some of the programs and such that I use, and therefore I’m reluctant to change just because someone says it’s time to change. I stuck with MS 2000 until late 2004 because it was time to change, and I liked the change when I finally went in that direction. But I had to give up a lot of programs that didn’t work with XP, and I had to give up all my 3.5″ floppies because I didn’t have an A-drive anymore.

One thing I refused to do was switch to IE7. Strange for me, because I’d always updated before. I did actually test IE7 when it first came out, and I couldn’t find out how to get to the menus, and I didn’t have any toolbars. Maybe there was a way to get to them, but I didn’t have the time then and there, so I rolled back to IE6 and went on my merry way. But last night, or this morning, I finally broke down and loaded IE7, just to test the theory. And, of course, the theory worked. This site looks fine, and it now explains why everyone else saw it better and more correctly than I did; sigh,…

Of course, now this is bringing back to me the initial problem I had with Firefox 3, how I said I wasn’t going to upgrade, and how someone from Firefox actually commented on this blog (which was shocking and nice at the same time) giving some information, part of which was that Firefox 2 won’t be supported after a certain point. One thing that I’m going to have to reconcile in my mind is that if I’m going to continue doing work on the web, I’m going to have to be willing to upgrade to certain things from time to time, even if I’m going to lose some of the functionality I’ve gotten used to and loved in the past.

After all, it’s happened before. When I got my first Windows 95 PC, I learned quickly that all the games and programs I had before suddenly weren’t compatible with it, which included the program I used for writing everything (anyone else remember IBM’s Writing Assistant?). Yet, once I got into it, I realized that first Word Perfect, then MS Word, were a major improvement over what I’d had before, as well as Excel being a major improvement over what I’d been using as a spreadsheet program before (can’t remember the name, but it it was pre-Lotus 1-2-3).

So, in my own way, I’m also being dragged into the 21st Century. And that’s not such a bad thing, I guess. Back in December I got my first phone that had texting capability and stated I didn’t want it, and now I can’t imagine living without it. And the world keeps moving on.

For once, I’m putting a question out to the world with this blog instead of trying to answer something.

I got my computer back about two weeks ago. Ever since I got it back, I keep having these socket errors. Now, to be truthful, before I took my computer in, I’d find that my Mailwasher program would suddenly not show any new email, saying the server was being shut down, both on this computer and on my laptop, but oddly enough it was only for my main Road Runner account, and not the secondary account.

However, what happens now only seems to affect my computer, and it’s these socket errors. Each time, the number changes, though it’s been relegated to only 3 different error numbers thus far: 10048, 10055, 10057. When I go through Google to see if I can find something to help me out, I’m basically clueless in what they’re saying. There’s a lot of computer terminology that I don’t understand, even though I know a lot of stuff; it would seem to be that there’s really no way to learn all of it, especially if it’s not your main job.

I have learned a couple of things, though. A part of it seems to be that, whatever a socket it, I have multiple programs trying to access the same one at times. I only notice it when things start to shut down; it’s all related to the internet, by the way. So, at one time, I might have open my Firefox browser, my Thunderbird email client, my Feedreader program, and my Mailwasher program, all of which access the internet. I’ve learned that when things start freezing up, I should close either Mailwasher, Thunderbird, or Feedreader, and often I at least get my access to the internet back with Firefox. Every once in awhile, though, that still doesn’t get it done, and I actually have to either disconnect my Linksys router AND my cable modem for 30 seconds, then try again, or, in extreme cases, reboot the computer.

Frankly, this is a mess. Oh yeah, I’m running Panda software as both my antivirus and the firewall, and I’d been thinking that maybe it was the problem, but I tested and found that when I shut it down I was still having the issue, so I know that’s not it.

Anyway, I put it out there to the world, hoping someone can give me some assistance on this one, using plain language that even I can understand. That’s kind of the bigger issue, in my opinion, yet something most of us don’t think about. We use this terminology to do our jobs that those working with us understand, then we use the same terminology on someone else and they stare at us like we’ve just tried to read Hamlet to them (I’ve only ever made it through 10 pages of that). Yeah, I could probably take it back to the computer guy, but I think I’ve had enough of that for now.

I thank any and everyone who offers some assistance.

So, the continuation of the story of some of my computer issues. When I last wrote, I’d had to contact customer service to reactivate my cable connection. I got that, but I was still having major problems with many webpages.

I thought maybe the problem was with the Panda software that I now have as my virus protection, as well as my new firewall. I disabled the firewall and tested it; nothing changed. I disabled a couple other things and tried it; nothing changed.

I then decided to open IE, as I’d been doing everything on Firefox. Everything was working on IE, so it made me rethink what I was doing. I went into the tools of Firefox and kept looking at everything there; I couldn’t find anything else I could do that I hadn’t already done. I even reloaded Firefox 2.0.0.16, which I was surprised I could even still find, and that didn’t fix anything.

Then, for some unknown reason, I started to wonder if it was the cookies. I’m not sure why I thought of it but it seemed to be one thing I hadn’t touched. I went into Firefox cookies and deleted those that were associated with webpages I was having problems with. Then I opened those pages; there it was! Every page was suddenly working again, and life was fun once more. I went back in and deleted some other cookies, which I have rarely paid attention to, because I’d noticed that some of them are tracking cookies, and they really don’t need to be on my computer.

I wish I’d thought about the cookies before I’d gone through all that other stuff. I put it here so y’all can check them out from time to time. I’ve done some research since then and have found that, indeed, cookies can sometimes get corrupted for one reason or another. But they’re easy to check, easy to delete, and easy to get back; just go back to the page and they’ll come back.

Now, life is almost back to perfect; I still need to figure out this buffer issue that seems to happen from time to time, but otherwise, I’m happier than I’ve been in awhile.

I now have my main computer back. I brought it home Friday, and started putting stuff back onto it Friday night. Through most of the day Saturday, I started adding more stuff, but I was testing each thing I put on just to see if it was all working. I even felt comfortable enough Saturday night that I decided to play a little bit of online poker. This was after we got home from an art show that a friend of mine, Isaac Bidwell, had in Oswego, NY at the Arts Association (this link will probably go to something else once his exhibits are over).

Around 1:30 in the morning, when I was nearing the end of my poker tournament (and sitting in 4th place, no less), I started to notice that my browser wasn’t working properly. Rather, none of the pages I was trying to load were coming up. I was irked, to say the least, and ended up bombing out of my tournament in 3rd place (it still paid off; play money, but hey, I’ll take what I can get) because I was distracted by it all. I made an assumption that I was having problems because my wife, who would normally have been asleep, was on the laptop in the other room checking email, and maybe we were on the same ISP. But when she finally shut down, I still couldn’t get on, so I shut down for the night myself, thinking maybe the computer would be better this morning.

Nope; didn’t work. So I start doing all the stuff I know how to do: unplug and re-plug back in the modem; cmd - ipconfig stuff; turning off firewall from new Panda software. Nothing worked. Then I decided to make sure it wasn’t just my computer, so I hooked the laptop up to the other cable (I pay for 2 ISP addresses) and it wasn’t working either. Now I knew it wasn’t my computer, but something with Road Runner instead.

I called them up, and the first woman was no help at all. She kicks me up to technical support (who was I talking to the first time, then, since I thought she was technical support?), and this woman has me disconnect both the cable modem and my Linksys router. After 30 seconds she asks me to hook everything back up and turn on the computer; wa-la! Internet is back and all looks great. I go to the other room and all is successful; yay!

One still always should do some of their own diagnostics before calling the company first, but sometimes it really doesn’t have to do with anything of ours. I’m glad also; I need that Panda firewall.

Winter Grandeur Revealed by Curt Walters Price: $600.00

For those of you who read my initial story about my meeting with the Computer Guy, there’s an update, of sorts. At this point I still don’t have my computer back, but today I decided it was finally time to call him.

On the phone, he didn’t sound quite as convincing as he did when I’d met him in person last Thursday. He said that they’d had to try to find all the drivers for the machine because I’d forgotten to give them that disk (my bad, but I’m only around the corner; they couldn’t call me?), and that, for the most part, everything seemed to be working great, except for the one game I took them, which I’d said had never worked on the computer. He couldn’t get the blue screen of death to come up, but he did say that it initially ran bad, then the screen went black, and that wasn’t good at all. He asked if I had any other games that I’d run on it and I told him I did have another game, but never tried to run it on that computer since the other one had never worked. He asked me to bring it in so they could test it.

I had to stop at home first, since I was heading out of town, grab the game, then drove to the store. He had the doors wide open, and I asked him if he hadn’t heard it was supposed to get up to 87F. He said it wasn’t there now, but he had some nice beads of sweat on his head, as did I, so he was feeling it, even if he was ignoring it. He took the game from me, The Sims, and loaded it onto the computer. It loaded fast, even faster than it had on my previous computer, and it looked pretty good, though neither of us could remember how to play the thing.

Still, I had kind of the same gripe I’d had with Comp USA when I took it to them; there wasn’t anything on the computer so of course there weren’t going to be any problems. But he had no programs to load, so I was stuck there. Actually, for a guy deeply into computers, it’s amazing just how much in the dark ages his own stuff is, for the most part. For instance, he doesn’t use any USB items on his computers; can you believe that? He stated that USB is one of the worst technologies he’s ever had to deal with because it allows so many items that turn out not to be compatible with each other and then causes lots of crashes. Thus, he has nothing wireless; he doesn’t even use a mouse with a wheel!

So I told him that whenever I watched a few .WMV files in a row that my computer sometimes shut down. He asked where I got them from, and I said people send me little .WMV files here and there. He said that he doesn’t ever accept any email that has attachments, and immediately deletes everything. I asked if he was serious and he said yes, because he didn’t know how many other computers any of those files might have touched, and therefore he wasn’t entrusting anyone else’s motives on his own stuff. I was kind of stunned by that one, but I guess I shouldn’t have been, since last week he told me that he doesn’t download any email to his computer, preferring to use the online email program that comes with his ISP. I’d never known anyone who wanted to do that, as most of us download email so we can save stuff we want for later and for the convenience; not Bob, though.

Then I looked around and realized that he also doesn’t have any flat screen LCD monitors for his own usage. He said he doesn’t trust that technology either, and prefers having the large, stable monitors to work on instead. Good thing he has lots of workspace, but still,… Then I remembered that, last week, he said that when people have these things he’ll ask them to bring in all their other components so he can test them against each other, including their monitors if the problem has to do with their video cards. Talk about your throwbacks!

Then we talked about motherboards. He said that if he couldn’t produce a blue screen then he couldn’t even say whether it was the motherboard or not, but that it really didn’t matter. He said he couldn’t get a motherboard that any of my present components would work with, including my hard drives, because technology has pushed forward; after all, I did have it put together in 2004. He said that if I added anything new to the mix that it would probably bring my computer down, since it wasn’t built for many of the things today, and this came about because I asked about the TV emulator he had on his own computer. He also said that the Radeon video card I’d put into my computer was one of the worst in the world, and when I said that both PC World and PC Magazine had rated it high, which is why I’d bought it, he said that, for true gaming professionals, Radeon is terrible because it basically emulates technology that other video cards actually create, and therefore is considered garbage among these folks. Of course, I’m not a gamer, but still,… And, as a throw in, he also said that Dell computers aren’t close to being as good as what people think they are; I couldn’t argue with him on that, never having a Dell.

Anyway, he’s going to have my computer one more night, and that’s it. I said that I’d be coming in around 11AM to get it, as this was kind of my vacation week, and next week starts my real work again, and even though I have to load a bunch of stuff back onto it, I need to use that one more than my poor laptop, which has worked like a champion over this past week, but is four years old itself, actually older than my other computer, and really isn’t meant for the kind of power work I put into a computer on a regular basis. I have no idea how much any of the work I’ve had done is going to cost, which my friend Kelvin thought was a pretty stupid thing, but hey, I don’t think I’m going to get hosed on the deal, based on my memories from the past; we’ll see, though.

Maybe I should have followed my first mind and just bought a new computer, eh?

John Louis Home Deluxe Closet System Price: $470.00