The New Computer

Well, after a short period of mourning I had to replace the recently deceased laptop. I shopped around and found a nice HP Pavilion 17-inch model that wasn’t nearly as expensive as I had expected. Two problems: 1. It (and all others, as well) came loaded with Windows VISTA, and I had heard many negative comments about VISTA, and 2. It came loaded with few really important programs, as is the way of the world these days.

That’s not to say that the software that came resident on the machine wasn’t interesting, useful and even neat, in some instances, only that it didn’t have a word processor, spreadsheet, etc., other than MS Works, which if that’s all you can get will work, but which is woefully deficient. That meant I had to buy MS Office 2007 if I wanted reasonable productivity.

So I bought Office, too, and off I went to set it up.

The basic machine is very nice, and has some great features, mostly due to the advances in technology over the last five years. And, honestly, I’ve had far more trouble from the “upgraded” and “improved” Office 2007 Word than with VISTA. For example, without warning Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, took all of the familiar commands and hid them where you can’t find them, replacing the old and very user friendly menu system with a mystery system. As many of you know, I have degrees in education and taught many years in secondary and post-secondary classrooms. One technique taught to prospective teachers is the “discovery” method, where students are left to learn things on their own without too much guidance from the teacher. This is a great mechanism in the classroom; it isn’t a great mechanism with computers, causing much frustration where frustration is neither needed nor called for. One wonders precisely what it is that software designers have in mind when they update programs and make radical changes like this.

I have yet to dive into Excel or PowerPoint yet, so who knows what nightmares await?

And, VISTA had a big surprise that I just stumbled on today. When I was shopping for the computer and Office, I came across some voice recognition software, and was intrigued. This is something that I’ve been interested in for a few years, and seeing the software reawakened this urge. Given that VRS would cost $90 to $190, I wasn’t moved to buy it. But guess what? While looking in the Control Panel, there for all to behold was an icon titled “Speech Recognition.” So, even though today was Newsletter Thursday, I couldn’t resist the temptation to dive into it.

It takes a little getting used to, and it is somewhat cumbersome, in some respects, but for me, the way I work and the way I write, it will be helpful.

So, despite the idiocy in the new Word version, and despite the irresistible allure of speech recognition in VISTA, the newsletter was published on time, and with not much more difficulty than usual. And the new computer … well, let’s just say that so far, the transition has been fairly painless.

So far, that is.


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Spoke Too Soon

Well, my celebration, a fairly glorious moment of triumph, was short-lived.

The preceding article dealt with my happiness when my laptop, soaked in a rainstorm that was not forecast or expected, came back to life after 36 hours of worrying about it. This machine, those of you who read the first piece will remember, was put back in use after a newer one failed. However, it was not without its own problems, notably that the battery port had been damaged so that it could not use battery power and had to be plugged in.

Just before dinner time Saturday I shut down the computer so that I could move it outside to play music while we had dinner on the deck. When I tried to start the machine up, it would run for a couple of seconds, and shut down again. It did this several times. The magic of the reset button that had been so effective after the water torture event did not work any magic this time. Nothing made any difference.

The computer is dead.

R.I.P.

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Newsletter Thursday

I am the Webmaster and the editor of the newsletter for an organization I belong to, and every Thursday I spend the better part of the day writing up the week’s program and updating the Web site. This week was an especially frustrating experience.

When the weather is nice I take the laptop out on the deck and work on the outdoor table that has an umbrella over it to keep the sun off me. This week, as with many summer days, there was the possibility of a late afternoon/early evening thundershower, but when it was time to write up Tuesday’s program, the sun was shining. After lunch I went back outside and went to work finishing the write-up, and around 2 p.m. completed the task. At that point I had to go inside to the office at set up the Web pages and upload the newsletter and other updated pages to the Web host. After about a half-hour, I realized that there was some information that I needed that I had left on the table outside.

When I climbed the stairs from the basement office I could see sunshine on the hillside out back through the door to the deck, but when I got to the top of the stairs and could see the deck itself, I realized that it was also raining. I didn’t get too excited, since the rain was more of a sprinkle than a downpour, and the computer was, after all, under the umbrella. But I couldn’t see the table from where I was and when I went out on the deck and made my way over to the table, I saw that the papers I had out there were soaked, and I realized that while it was only sprinkling now, it apparently had really poured before that. When I got to the computer, its screen was dark and water droplets covered the screen, the keyboard, the mouse pad … everything on the table was soaked and the computer had gotten wet enough to have shut down.

Panic ensued.

This laptop had survived a few crises, and had been replaced by a new one when it developed a problem accessing the Internet that I couldn’t solve. What good is a computer that can’t access the Internet, after all? So I replaced it. Not too long thereafter, the new laptop developed a problem I couldn’t solve, so I reactivated the one that was now soaked, and found and cured the Internet access problem (weird how necessity creates solutions you couldn’t find before the crisis, isn’t it?), and have been using it for a few months. Efforts to get the computer to run failed; it just sat there, doing nothing.

Well, I didn’t immediately go out and get a new machine, although that prospect did enter my mind. Who wants to have to spend a thousand bucks that you don’t have on a new laptop that has Windows Vista on it that isn’t compatible with most of your non-Microsoft software, and which comes with almost no programs pre-loaded? So, I put the laptop in a position that would drain the water out of it, and let it sit for a few hours. I tried to fire it up a few times at various intervals without success, sometimes hearing “frying” sounds that gave me a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, and then left it until this morning, figuring that both it and me would benefit from a night’s sleep.

This morning I plugged the cord into the wall, only to find that the light that indicates that the computer is plugged in was flashing like it should be, which it always did, and that the light that indicates that the computer is on was flashing, too, which it should not be, but which it had been doing since the ill-fated, un-expected and un-forecast rainstorm. I had just resigned myself to having to buy a new laptop, when one of those little flashes of insight flashed in my brain. I remembered the reset button on the bottom of the laptop, stuck my mechanical pencil in the little hole and reset the machine, and, eureka, it started working.

So, to borrow from my friend Buffalo, life is sweet – when things work out and you don’t have to contemplate buying a new computer.

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