Laptop woes

My laptop is fritzing out again. I think it’s on its last legs for sure this time.

I just ordered a new one. Le sigh. Thank God that’s an option, but boo hiss on surprise expenses. 

If I can’t revive my machine, I’ll have to work on Mark’s laptop until my new one arrives.

It’s harder than it ought to be to find a 17” screen with touchscreen AND (hardest of all) an optical drive. I’m old school that way. HP came through on all counts. 👍🏻

Fresh Start

Holy moley, what a few days it's been!

I believe that I have finally gotten my PC straightened out. I had to reset it twice on Thursday, when it would not let me boot or log in. I would get to the animated circlng dots, either during the bootup process or after entering my PIN, and there it would stay for eternity.

End result: I let the reset process take place (which lasted eons) and worked from my little netbook on Thursday. Finally, on Friday, the computer was at a point where I could work all day on it.

I have since been doing additional cleanup, as well as reinstallation of software. I think I am FINALLY at the point where, once this last little bit of installation is done, I will be recovered from the past four days of agita.

No wonder the freaking Geek Squad is so expensive. Jiminy Cricket, this was a travail!

But the good news is, my computer IS working. I didn't have to take it anywhere to be serviced, and I can continue using it to work from home during social distancing, so hip, hip, hooray!

That moment when you are working on THREE PCs at once

I strongly suspect that the hard drive on my main PC is on its last legs. Argh grumble mumble swear cuss growl.  The disk usage has been tending to be in the 90-100% range consistently, even when I'm not doing anything particularly intensive.

Therefore, this is the setup I have going today

First, I have my main computer set up (after having spent about 30 hours between yesterday and the day before doing resets and a bunch of other "Dear Lord and Patron Saints of Tech, let this work" stuff. We are finally at a point where it takes a little under 10 minutes to boot up. Which is better than getting stuck infinitely during the bootup and not actually booting at all.

Second, I have my main computer remotely connected to my work computer, so that's two PCs I'm using.

Third, I have my netbook open, so that when things are calm on the work front, I can look up fixes for Windows 10 excessive disk usage, and not cause my main PC to use its disk any more than it absolutely has to. Because too much disk usage equals frozen computer, which equals 10 minutes spent recovering from frozen computer, and I do not need that while I am trying to actually get freaking WORK done.

So there you have it. I am working on 3 PCs at once, because I'm just that much of a geek.

P.S. I have also started to apply any of the fixes I find that don't involve a restart. We have gotten the disk usage down to somewhere in the 80% range.  Go, me! That's still way higher than I want it, but it makes Frozen Computer Syndrome less likely, so I will take it.

Tiny But Mighty

Working from home has just gotten a lot more interesting, in the sense of the Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times".

My main computer, the 17" laptop, started hanging during boot yesterday. All I was getting was the spinning dots. To make a long story a lot less long, I used Google-fu on my phone and tried a whole bunch of scan and repair techniques, all of which did diddly squat to fix the problem.

So I am left with the nuclear options. First, I am trying to reset the PC such that it keeps the files but reinstalls Windows. In the event that fails, the next option is just do a complete clean install of All The Things and start from scratch.

I am decidedly Not Happy about the fact that it has been showing "Resetting the PC.... 1%" for two hours.

However, this is where the Tiny But Mighty comes in. I have got a 7" netbook, which is barely bigger than my iPhone XS Max Plus screen,  Last night, when it became clear that the likelihood was slim that I would have the main PC up and running by 7 AM this morning, I started setting up the netbook to connect to work.

So that's what I am doing today and, apparently, every day until I get my pain PC back up and running.

What can I say? Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

Since this netbook does not have a camera (the one thing I would change about it), I had to go retrieve my webcam from the camera bag and set it up, to ensure that it was working in time for our conference call this afternoon. I actually need the camera more for its microphone capabilities than for its imaging, for the time being, as the netbook's audio drivers got glitched by a Windows update many  moons ago For whatever reason, it doesn't recognize its own microphone anymore, but it does work with the camera's mic, so I set the camera up. Nobody shares audio in these meetings, though we COULD if we wanted to. I don't want to, lol.

So wish me luck in reinstalling Windows on my machine, because I am OVER these blasted problems. #FML