My new desktop should have been delivered to
my guru yesterday so I suppose it's only a matter of time before my
frustrations have to do with learning a new system and not with coaxing
along a doddering old laptop that is trying to keep up with me, but is
really on its last legs.
When I bought this laptop, Vista had just
come out and I knew of the problems with that operating system and wanted to
stick with XP. Fry's found one reconditioned Toshiba that still had XP
and I bought that. I have been very happy with it all these years.
I only use it when we travel, so I can
continue to write Funny the World using the Front Page program and not have
to do it in code (because I'm lazy). I can do it in code if
necessary, fortunately.
But the machine is old and riddled with
viruses. It regularly gives me error messages saying that a certain
script has stopped working and giving me the option of letting it continue
to try to run, debugging the script or stopping the script. I have
found that the only option it will actually let me use is stopping
the script, so I do that. But when I'm dealing with that, the machine
is locked up for 5 minutes or so. Many times throughout the day.
It's biggest problem, however, is that if you
let it sit for a few hours, or overnight especially, it takes forEVer to get
it started. Yesterday I got up at 3 a.m. to write my entry, since I'd
fallen asleep watching a movie, waiting for Walt to get home, and just
stumbled off to the couch to sleep instead of writing it then.
When I got up and got the computer started,
it immediately got the script error message. I was able to click on
"stop script" and timed it. It took fifteen minutes before the
screen finally shut down.
In the morning everything is slow.
I am both a night person and a morning person and when my feet hit the floor
in the morning, I am ready and raring to go, especially when I know I have
conked out the night before and never got an entry written.
But the computer needs to yawn and stretch
and scratch and I don't know whatever computers do when they are waking up.
And then about 10 or 15 or 20 minutes into my attempts to coddle it to
please give me this screen, it starts to come to life. It will
give me the screen I'm trying to use, but it won't let me use it. It
just sits there taunting me with a cursor that won't move and a program
waiting for me, silently.
It's like it used to be trying to start
Walt's old Rambler. You find a nice incline and try to get it rolling
fast enough that you can start the engine and then eventually, when it feels
good and ready, it finally roars to life.
As I sat here trying to wait out the script
errors and the frozen screens, praying that it will give me just a few more
days service until the desktop is back, I was thinking that what this
machine needs in the morning is a good stiff cup of very strong coffee to
jolt it awake.
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