I'm Melting, Melting..

I discovered that two things which do not mix well are: lack of sleep and computer problems.  Poor Walt got home from work today and found me in tears just from the frustration of it all.

My problem, as I have said before, is that I haven't had enough problem with my computer(s), so when something goes wrong, even something simple, it's been so long since it went wrong before that I don't know where to look and am not sure what to do.

I sent a message to the guru last night, telling him of my plight, but I didn't hear from him until the afternoon.  In the meantime I recreated this journal page and hope that it will post all right when I go to post it, unlike last night.  It would be nice to get to bed before 3 a.m.

When I finally heard back from the guru, he gave me some suggestions to test for whether it was the computer monitor or not.  One thing he suggested was to connect the monitor to this laptop and he told me how to switch between the big monitor and the built-in monitor.

 

My main problem with doing that is that there is no space to work in.  A friend of mine has been, for many months, cleaning out her mother's house.  The mother was a hoarder and the daughter decided to keep a blog about cleaning up the house. The mother, who died more than a year ago, could easily have been the subject of a hoarder rescue reality TV show.  I'm not anywhere near that, but I have a very small office, filled with too many pieces of furniture and my desk has too much crap on it. 

To really attach the laptop to the desktop monitor takes 3 hands to do efficiently.  Having only two hands, I did what I could.  Got it attached and nothing happened.  I detached it, came back here to the family room with the laptop, plugged it back into the wall, and could not connect to the internet.  It kept telling me that network was unplugged.

I swear, I spent half an hour, alternately screaming and crying and trying everything I could to get an internet connection before I discovered that in attaching the laptop to the monitor, I had inadvertently disconnected a connection on the back of the router in my office.  Once I plugged that back in again, everything was fine.

But the problem is that this laptop, which I love most of the time, is not the speedy machine that the desktop is. Everything takes time. In trying to problem solve the "connection unplugged" mystery, I shut down all the programs on the laptop, and rebooted, but that did nothing, so I shut it down completely and did a cold re-boot, which also did nothing (now, of course, I know why).

But "shutting down" the laptop takes a painfully long time and rebooting takes a painfully long time and the more frustrated I became, the less patient I became so that by the time poor, well-meaning Walt asked "what can I do to help?" I could do nothing but yell at him because I didn't know what anybody could do to help because I didn't know what I was doing.

There were a couple of other emotionally jarring things that contributed to my mental state, but mostly it was the computer and the lack of sleep.

We finally got the laptop hooked back up again, with Walt providing the third hands, did the test the right way and have pretty much decided that yes, indeed, it is a bad monitor.

By now I'm calm again because I know I will get a new monitor tomorrow.  However, if the new monitor doesn't solve the problem, you may expect fireworks and lots of tears coming from this little part of California.