It’s Been Frustrating

For the last month or so, every so often when I would turn on my Dell desktop computer, it would not fully boot up. It would start the process and then go to a blank screen. Usually when that happened it would take two or three attempts before the computer would finally come on.

Then, starting three or four days ago, it would start to boot up and then go to a blue screen that would give me one of several different messages. One message was that there was a Registry Error, another message was that there was a Kernel Security Check Failure, or a Kmode Exception Not Handled message, or a System Service Exception, or an APC Index Mismatch.

When that happened, the computer would automatically restart itself, and more than half the time it would go right back to that same screen blue screen, although always with one of the other messages mentioned. Or, if it did start up, I might be able to work for five minutes to two hours, and all of a sudden I would get a message that said Windows failed to load and I would have to start the process all over again. To add to that, a few days ago when it crashed, it wiped out my email program. When I got the mail set back up, I had lost all recent emails from probably the last 10 to 12 days. They were just gone.

When I got up Wednesday morning, the computer was again playing these silly games, and I fooled around with it for over two hours with no success. By then we had to leave to go to Jacksonville for an appointment Terry had at Mayo.

The good news is, the trip to Mayo and back was easy, as was her appointment. She has to go back in six months for another follow-up, but everything seems to be fine in that department.

We got back home somewhere around 5 o’clock Wednesday afternoon, and for three hours I fought with the computer, trying to get it to load. Only once in all that time did it actually load up and work, and that only lasted for about 15 minutes. By then, if I had any hair, I would have been pulling it out.

Fortunately, one of my neighbors, a young man named Mike Smith, does some computer repair on the side. I texted him, and he asked me to drop the computer off on his porch and he would come out, sanitize and pick it up, then take a look at it. We are both aware of COVID 19 restrictions and we both have some health issues, so we were not going to talk face-to-face. Mike kept the computer overnight and was working on it again yesterday. When I talked to him in the afternoon, he said that it did not seem to be a hardware problem, but rather an operating system issue. He had some other things to take care and then he would start reloading it. I am sure glad I back everything up religiously!

I didn’t post a blog for Thursday because I was just too worn out and frustrated to deal with it. I don’t use my laptop very often, usually just when we are on trips, and when I got it out I could not get Microsoft Word or any of my Office 365 apps to run. They kept giving me a message that my subscription was expired. I knew that was wrong, because Terry and I share a subscription and it still has a year to go. I spent a couple hours trying to find a solution to that problem online and got nowhere. Finally, after being on hold on the computer for close to another hour, someone from Microsoft tech support came on. As it turns out, when I first bought the computer it came with a year of the business version of Microsoft Office, and when that expired, I switched to the home edition Terry and I share. But the business edition never got deleted, which I why I was getting the error messages

The tech very patiently talked me through how to delete the business version and then to activate the home version. When he got that done, I thought I was good to go and thanked him for his time. But then when I started trying to get some work done, I could not get the ribbon bar across the top with all the different tools to appear. Fortunately, I was able to go online and do some research and get that problem fixed.

But wait, there’s more! The next issue was that my Dragon Naturally Speaking program would not recognize my digital recorder. So, I had to delete the program from the laptop and reinstall it.

Long story short, even with all the delays, frustrations, and headaches, I was able to knock out another 2,000 words in my new Tinder Street book by the end of the day, and to write this blog.

Mike tells me that he hopes to have my desktop computer back to me sometime today, and I’m really looking forward to it.

Thought For The Day – It’s finally September. Only 47 more months to go and this year is over!