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Sunday, December 02, 2007

Computer, Heal Thyself

So the Wisconsin snow arrived here today, but it wasn't a very big deal. I think it lost some of its oomph somewhere over Cleveland. It was the soft, melty kind of snow, only an inch or two of it, and easy to shovel - even for me. It's raining now.

I just wanted to mention an odd computer phenomenon. I don't understand what eats up so much space on computers, anyhow. Yes, I have a lot of photos, but not that much else. What is going on with having only 2G left out of 40? So I was ruthlessly getting rid of stuff. No, I wasn't sure exactly what it all was, but it was all stuff that Control Panel PROMISED me I hadn't used for over two years.

After a lot of energetic purging and deleting, not ONLY did I see that almost nothing had been accomplished in terms of space-saving, but the screen was looking weird. Things that were supposed to be square (icons, crosswords, sudokus, for example) were horizontally stretched-out RECTANGLES - like little place mats. Fonts looked strangely elasticized.

It could have been worse. I've fought with routers and modems for a connection. Dealt with cable and phone companies and their finicky wires. At least I could still DO stuff. So I decided I'd just live with it a while. I won't complain. I won't monkey around and maybe make it worse. I'll deal with it later. That was about a week ago.

Today everything is suddenly and completely back to normal. As if it knew it had been misbehaving and decided to be good again. Who knows why?

2 Comments:

Blogger Cate said...

Have you ever seen that email forward that circles around every few years or so talking about PCs compared to Macs and one of the things (phrases? points? jokes? I don't remember) is akin to, "You wouldn't tolerate your car just freezing up on you inexplicably and then seemingly fixing itself, why do we tolerate our computers doing so?"

I have had endless problems w/PCs over the years, and most have been fixed by scan disks, deleting and defrags, but many, disturbingly, seem to just disappear... and I don't know why.

I keep saying the next computer I own will be a Mac, but each time it actually comes time to buy one I can't quite pull the trigger... I'm nervous about the increased price, of course, but somehow I've grown accustomed to all my Dell's quirks and the fear of the unknown has kept me in PC limbo.

Hope you come up with something! Who knows, maybe QV will have some insight.

12:06 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I have converted to the world of Macs, and I have to say that I LOVE it. I still use my IBM PC for work, so I haven't switched completely, but I really do love having a Mac as my personal computer. But the one piece of advice (for either a Mac or PC user) is to get an external hard drive as a back up system (it's almost like a huge thumb drive). I have one that is I think 100G, and every so often, I just connect it to my computer, and it acts as an extra drive, and it's been a good back up system for me. I store all of my pictures, etc. And speaking as someone who has lost many critical files when various computers have crashed (and thus lost all of the data), I highly recommend having a good back up system. My tech support at work told me that computers have a "shelf life" of about 2 years and then they can kind of just kick the bucket, so to speak, any time after that (which is what happened to me a couple of times)...so as the motto goes "save early, save often"...I know there are much more experienced computer experts (...Quantum void) who could provide better advice, but ...that's my two cents for the day.... - H

11:35 PM  

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