Running on empty…
Some days it seems that no matter what you do to get ahead, you end up behind. We came home from Balticon and set up all the laptops and the network again and found that the printer won’t work with the network anymore. So, it’s now hardwired to my USB port and we can only print using my laptop. That’s great except that out of the 8 USB ports on this laptop only three of them work — the one with the mouse, the one with my external hard-drive, and now the one with the printer attached. So, to upload photos I’m going to have to take one of those out and then put it back. Not such a big deal in the scheme of things.
But, here’s the next thing; my laptop is not doing to well lately either. It takes forever to boot and while most of the time I can use the etch-a-sketch method of getting rid of the line across the bottom 1/3 of my screen so that it looks fine, it is getting slower and slower and slower.
Before someone mentions running stuff here’s what I’ve done to try to speed it up. I ran SpywareBlaster (nothing found), Spybot – Search & Destroy (found two cookies that were removed), AdAware (found nothing), ran MS Disk Cleanup, and MS Disk Defragger (said I didn’t need to run it but did so anyway). Not one bit of difference. Our in-house network is password protected and we live on five acres in farming country. I’m stumped other than to think that it’s just that the machine is old (nearly 6 years) and maybe things are failing — it does make a wicked racket while turned on — there’s the fan and a constant humming, stuttering sound.
I’ve heard that clearing everything off and re-installing the system would help but I don’t have the system disks, if I ever even got them when I bought the laptop. I do know that Hyperion’s machine, which is newer than mine, didn’t come with the system disks unless we paid extra.
So, it’s looking like I need a new machine once I get the budget figured out and save up a bit more. On the other hand, when you have to wait so long between asking a file to open and it opening — I manage to get some housework done. I think tomorrow I’m going to sit here with my knitting — maybe I can intimidate the machine into behaving when it knows that I’m going to have some fun task to work on when it drags its proverbial feet.