February 23, 2005

  • Ah, me! Well, it has been quite a couple of days with this computer thing. I wound up taking the CPU and sound system to my friendly local computer fix-it place. This is a different friendly computer fix-it place than I used to use. There used to be a real good one within driving distance, with knowledgeable computer fix-it types who knew how to talk to computer tyros like me. Somewhere along the way they hired this guy who should have stayed in back, conversing with motherboards and printed circuits. But, no, they let him interact with customers. He, unfortunately, had the attitude of " No, you're wrong, and I am smarter than you, and I don't want to do to your computer what you want me to do." It got so bad I complained about him, and I am generally pretty laid back about things like this. Soooo, they moved, reorganized, changed their name, and guess what? Guess who the one guy was that management retained to work in the store! Just guess! Uh-huh!


    Ennyhoo, I took my CPU to the new place, and they discovered that the sound was turned down on the Windows control panel. Bless their hearts, they did not say "You musta done somethin'," a phrase I have heard many times in dealing with computer service people. They readily acknowledged that there are times when Windows will turn sound down on its own, or it might have been a website that did it, or ghosts, or...Anyway, it wasn't my fault.


    So I brought the thing home and it crawled!! Nothing worked. Every program hung or did a "program is not responding" dance. Back I went to the computer fix-it place. I got a call from the tech with a long-face tone to his voice. It seems that the Windows program had become corrupted and we had to start from scratch. So I lost a lot of stuff in the process, including all kinds of e-mail and programs that had not yet been saved in an off-system storage process. I no longer have my Cubase SL program, which was a bear to install the first time. Fortunately, I got an independent recording system which I am in the process of setting up clearing space for. Hopefully that will be up and running by the end of the week. But, obviously the computer is functional again. and I am slowly restoring all my favorite site URLs. It is just a laborious process to try to restore some semblance of what used to be available.   Wish me luck!