The
10-28-2012
Hey Everybody,
If I ever need a new computer again, I think I'll
just gouge my eyes out instead – it would be a lot less painful.
When I temporarily moved to
For the next year or so, it worked great. Then the screen slowly developed a flicker
when you moved it, especially when you adjusted the angle to which it was open
– as if it were developing a short. I
got used to it and it was only mildly annoying.
Even though I'm not religious in the spiritual
sense, I've always been religious about backing up my computer files – every
two months. So when my hard drive
crashed in March – the morning after I had just done a backup (Ha, Ha, Eff You, Mr. Murphy!), I simply bought a new drive, had it
installed, loaded my factory recovery disk and restored all my backed up data.
Then in May, the screen flickering problem got
noticeably worse. It even occasionally
went completely dark a couple seconds after waking from sleep mode. [Come on baby, just hang in there a couple
more months and I will be able to afford a new one!] According to some Internet sites, it may have
been at least partially a software problem, but its hardware history told me it
was not long for this world.
I was due to back up my data on July 1st
but I just got busy with work and stuff so I didn't get a chance to back it
up. I would just make sure I did it that
weekend.
Murphy may have been down but he wasn't out – my
screen went completely dark a couple days before the weekend! Crap, now what am I going to do? I did have a 2-month-old backup but I'd sent
and received a lot of emails in those two months. Even worse, I had spent over a hundred hours
scanning my 35mm slides and I would have to rescan almost all of them!
And, of course, I would finally have to get a new
computer. Not a real big deal (I thought) – I saw plenty of good ones
advertised or displayed for around three or four hundred dollars.
This is where the story takes an ugly (and long and
boring) turn.
Friday night, July 6th, I went to the
Sherman Oaks Best Buy. As I expected,
they had plenty of laptops ranging in price from around $200 to well over a
thousand, with plenty around $400. There
was a bewildering array of choices and specifications and about all I knew was
that I didn't want the bottom price range, and since I would probably have it
for several years, I wanted something that wouldn't be completely out-of-date
in six months.
I walked through the aisles, keyed on a few and
read specs, but one really struck me because of its thin, brushed aluminum,
solid case. It was a Samsung, which
seems to be one of the top electronics brands these days. It also had an Intel Core i7 processor, which
seemed to be state-of-the-art from what I had read. With a price tag of $1000 (okay, $999.99), it
was priced about two-and-a-half times the amount I had planned to spend. But everything else just paled, once I got it
stuck in my craw.
The store was out of stock but there were supposed
to be three at the store in Burbank. So
I drove over there and bought one.
When I opened the box, I was impressed with the
packaging – usually a good sign that the product itself is of high
quality. It did have one little scratch
on the case by the keyboard, which I thought was odd since the lid had been closed
ever since it was manufactured. Then all
of a sudden I remembered that the one in the store had one, too – and in the
exact same place! Hmm, somebody should
tell them they might have a production problem.
Later I looked very closely in bright light and saw that the
"scratch" was an itty-bitty teeny-tiny picture of a microphone and
the other part of the "scratch" was a tiny hole for the microphone!
<blush> Sheesh, it's a good thing
I didn't try to return it as damaged!
When I turned it on, the keys lit up and it booted
up very quickly – in about 20 seconds.
Then the fun began.
I had lots of problems connecting – and staying
connected – to the Internet. Then I had
just as many problems setting up my email.
After several hours I got it all configured and it seemed to be working
okay, if not great. Then I thought I
should probably install my security software before I did much on the 'Net
anyway.
The only freebie I got with the computer was a free
year's subscription for Webroot security.
I wasn't super-excited about that, though, because I already used
Webroot security software and I thought I had recently paid for three years
anyway. I decided I should look it up
for sure and it was a good thing I did, because my subscription only had two
months left. So I put the Webroot CD in
my DVD drive and started to install it.
When it asked for the umpteen-digit security code I looked at the CD
case there was a sticker on it that said "Lift here for security
code". I tried to peel off the
sticker and had a helluva time – like old-fashioned price tags. I was destroying the sticker trying to remove
it (I hope I don't need it, I thought).
I could only get about half of it off but enough that I could tell there
was absolutely nothing under it. And it
really shouldn't be that difficult to remove the sticker anyway. I called Best Buy and they said, "maybe
you're taking TOO much off - the code should be very visible." Yeah, right.
Then I looked at it again. The
part of the sticker that said "Lift here..." was a half-inch-wide
black band and, looking at it more closely, I saw that it was just the band
that was supposed to be peeled off, not the whole sticker! So I peeled it off and saw the security code
plain as day..... Fourteen of the sixteen digits anyway; I had worked on it so
vigorously before that I had obliterated two of the digits. I tried several different letters and numbers
for the two that I was missing but to no avail.
Crap. Oh, well, easy come, easy
go. Luckily, Best Buy sent me a
follow-up email a couple days later, thanking me for my purchase and reminding
me to install my security software and HERE IS YOUR SECURITY CODE! So that's what those two missing digits were! So I was able to extend my subscription for
another year, although I had security code unlock problems because of my two
subscriptions and screwed around with that for a couple hours.
Now it was time to load my 2-month-old backup onto
the machine. The machine successfully
copied all of the files from my backup flash drive. However, the new computer has Windows 7 – not
XP like my old one – and Windows 7 doesn't use Outlook Express for the email
client. It uses a program called Windows
Live Mail, and it didn't seem to recognize my backed-up email files (I found
out later that it's very compatible – I just omitted one necessary file). Boy, it sure would be nice to be able to copy
those old files from my old computer.
I had read that Microsoft FINALLY made a free
"transfer wizard" for transferring your documents and settings to a
new computer. And you didn't need to buy
one of those overpriced "transfer cables"; you could use a flash
drive or a CD. The problem was you had
to install it on BOTH machines.
Normally, that would be fine, but my old laptop had that screen problem
so I wouldn't be able to tell what I was doing on it. LUCKILY, I found that if I put my desk lamp
about four inches from it and shined it directly on the screen, I could
actually read it well enough to work on it.
So I went to Microsoft.com, downloaded the free transfer program, and
installed it on both machines.
The program is called the "Easy Transfer
Wizard". It had step-by-step
instructions for using it and it suggested you print them so you wouldn't have
to keep your browser open, etc. So I
clicked on the Print icon. Got an error
message about the printer not being connected.
I did have it plugged in to the computer and to the electrical socket
but I did remember seeing an error that the device was unrecognizable.
So I put that problem on the back burner and
decided to try the transfer by just following the prompts, etc. And how hard could it be with a name like
"Easy Transfer Wizard"? Well,
it was fairly easy but not as easy as the name makes it sound. You have to tell it what to transfer,
although the default transfers everything you typically would want, as I
recall. I had it copy my files onto an 8
GB flash drive and Murphy's Law was in full force – it ran out of space with
just a few files to go. Well, I thought
I could tell which ones hadn't made it so I decided to just transfer the files
that had. I launched the wizard on my
new machine and transferred the incomplete set.
Wow, it even transferred the wallpaper I used on the old machine. Somewhat impressive. But being one who never leaves well-enough
alone, I thought, doggone it, maybe if I unselected some of the files I really
didn't need, the transfer would be complete and I'd get a more satisfying
"Transfer complete" message or something like that at the end.
First, I would have to erase the flash drive so I
could use it again. I knew the entire
backup set would be smaller so I didn't bother deleting EVERYTHING; I still
left three or four folders on it (why, I don't know). This time all the files fit on the drive.
I transferred that new set onto the new computer
but I forgot that I had already transferred most of them so most of them now
appeared as duplicates on the new computer – once with the original name and
once with the name plus a "(1)" tacked onto the name. Even all of my emails. So I had a lot of deleting to do!
The address book in Windows Live Mail is just
different enough that it has to make assumptions on what addresses are the
default and gets them wrong whenever you have more than one for a contact. So I had to go through all my contacts and
correct the default address on several dozen entries.
At some point, I needed my passwords which were in
an Excel spreadsheet but I hadn't installed my Microsoft Office suite (which
includes Excel) yet. I also wanted to
create a Word document so I installed my (vintage 1997) Microsoft Office
suite. My old version of Office
apparently isn't very compatible with Windows 7, especially the 64-bit version
that came with the computer, so it kept locking up and crashing. I even got a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death)!
At this point I'm thinking: Maybe there's someone down in Marina Del Rey that has a boat without a good anchor and I could
unload this frickin' thing! But I did some Googling and various Microsoft
downloads and managed to pretty well fix all the Office problems.
With that task complete, I decided to look at my
printing problem again. My printer is an
old HP LaserJet that has worked great for at least 13 years. But it was built back in the era before USB
so it has one of those wide parallel connections. What's worse, though, is that HP got greedy
and made all of their connectors non-standard so you'd have to buy HP cables, I
guess. Parallel-to-USB Converter cables
were pretty common when USB came out but they were all for the standard
size. Luckily I found a 2-inch adapter
that you could clip onto the standard cables and then even HP printers could be
used with USB-only computers. However,
this method didn't seem to work with this new computer. Scouring the Internet, I found that lots of
people were having this same problem with Windows 7. Several people mentioned that if you just get
a cable that had USB on one end and a parallel socket on the other end, it
would work. But that's essentially what
I had been using ("essentially" being the operative word). Apparently, Windows 7 didn't seem to like
that little extra adapter – when I plugged the cord into the computer it said
"unrecognized device". Maybe
those new cables that are explicitly designed for HP printers really do work,
especially since you don't have to have that extra adapter in the mix. So I bit the bullet (not too deeply; they
were less than $10) and ordered one.
When it came a few days later I connected it to my computer and to my
printer cord and Viola! It worked! One more little success.
At some point I needed to scan something so I
hooked up my scanner and installed my scanner software but the scanner wouldn't
respond to any clicks so I got on Google again and on Epson's Web site and
found that they don't have a 64-bit driver for my scanner (and probably never
would, according to one forum's post).
They did recommend a third party that had one, though, so I downloaded
the free trial version and it did indeed work (although I finally broke down
and paid $39.95 to get the full version without annoying watermarks, etc.).
There seems to be a bug in this new Windows Live
Mail when you forward an email with embedded pictures; for some reason it
doesn't include the pictures. Once in a
while it does but usually you have to save the pictures to your computer and
re-attach them. What a pain! And in Googling the problem I found that lots
of people have the problem but I didn't find a single person who was able to
fix it. One poster even said that
Microsoft is aware of the problem but hasn't made a fix yet.
So I thought maybe I should try using Microsoft
Outlook (not the same as Outlook Express) that I already have but only use for
my Calendar. I found a way to transfer
your Outlook Express email to Outlook but when I tried it I couldn't see where
they went. After digging and digging I
found this liiiiiiiiiiitle tiny icon that had all the
emails in it. I put them in a more
obvious place but when I click on any of the folders I get an error message
saying something about the form not found and that it will use an Outlook form
instead. Googling the problem I see that
lots of people have had that problem, too.
I tried most of the solutions but nothing fixed it. So I'm back to using Windows Live Mail.
Well, I'm on page 4 of this document and I could
probably go on for several more pages but I have told you most of the
highlights (lowlights).
Just be forewarned that if you buy a 64-bit
operating system you may have compatibility problems much like people had when
Vista first came out.
Hey, I see that Windows 8 has just come out . . . .
. AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!