Sunday, May 15, 2016

Another Windows Nightmare

          My windows laptop running Vista software sent me a notice that Microsoft would no longer support that operating system. That was bad, but when I got a notice that Google would follow suit and no longer support my Chrome browser for Vista I knew I was in trouble.
My good friend Kevin, with the help of team viewer, helped me upgrade to windows 7 and from there to windows 10. I wish I could rent him out to all of you for tech support. He is that good.
         He also helped me upgrade to windows 10 on my other laptop. That happened just before our moving to our new home, so I had no time to familiarize myself with the new systems. It seems to me that every time windows updates they change things so doing the same tasks has to be done in different ways.
          I reloaded all of my music onto the updated Vista computer, again thanks to Kevin for a lot of that content. I had hundreds of CD's on my external backup drive and Kevin's content added up to 30 giga-bytes of music ready to play.
          So yesterday I was listening to my tunes when I noticed the time and date was wrong. I knew how to set that on every system until windows 10. After about 15 minutes I found the right spot to do so; they had it hidden pretty well. I clicked on change time and date and that's when things went horribly wrong. The system stopped responding. I tried to use the old control + alternate + delete to bring up task manager. That has always had priority, but even that would not respond. I finally pushed and held down the power off button. The screen shut off, but I noticed the disk drive indicator would occasionally flash and did so for several minutes. I pulled the plug and turned the laptop over to remove the battery and while I was lifting the cover off I heard that familiar sound windows makes when the system finishes booting up. I flipped it over and opened the lid and there was windows, ready to play again. I did manage to set the time and date, before restarting the music player. I know better than to try and do anything else when the music player is running or when loading from an external scanner, but I was not thinking.
          I still want and occasionally need windows for just a few things, like holding 30 gigs of music and using my Canon picture editing software and doing anything pertaining to the state of Missouri, such as car registration and licensing or tax filing. For some bizarre reason the state has chosen not to allow interaction with Google Chrome. I can view anything but the state does not allow any transaction with Chrome. I have found my Google Chromebook does any daily tasks faster and better. The battery runs for over 10 hours, updates are done in seconds and unlike windows they do not take a half hour and use up my data plan.

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