MY COMPUTER WOES
by Hazed
I feel like it’s just one thing after another at the moment. Just as I am recovering from my recent health problems (see here for the details) I’ve had a major computer disaster.
The Wednesday before Easter the area I live in suffered a power cut during the evening. It only lasted about five minutes – just time enough for me to grope my way through a dark room to find a torch. But when the lights came back on, my computer didn’t.
I tried everything to revive it, including paying a technician to replace the power supply, but it remained completely dead. By the morning of Easter Friday I had concluded that I had to get a new computer. Luckily shops open even on public holidays nowadays so I went to the local computer store and bought a new Dell gaming computer.
Then I had to spend the rest of the holiday weekend setting it up. This involved getting to grips with Windows 10 (I was previously using Windows 7 which I had been very happy with). It was just different enough that I had to keep asking Google “how the hell do I do this…” but once I got used to its quirks I found that I actually like it a lot.
The new operating system brought with it one massive problem. A lot of the software I was running would not install on Windows 10 because it was so old. That meant spending the money for new versions. Along with the cost of the computer itself, this was turning out to be an expensive weekend.
One of the programs I use is Adobe’s Dreamweaver, the web creator that lets me put together the pages for the website, including the weekly Fed2 Star. But Adobe no longer sells this program outright. Instead, you have to subscribe to get a licence to use it, and keep paying every month, forever, or as long as you want to keep on using the software.
So I gritted my teeth, gave them my credit card number, and installed the software – only to realise that this new version is very different from the ancient one I had been using, and I am going to have to learn how to use it all over again. If you are reading the Star on the website this week, it will be proof that I have figured it out just enough to publish the web pages!
All in all, this was not how I planned to spend my holiday weekend.
Of course, since disasters are supposed to come in threes, I now expect to be hit by an asteroid!
Practical postscript: by last Sunday I had got my mail up and running so I was able to mail out the promised special April 1 edition of Winding Down. If you are not subscribed to the mailing list or you just missed reading it, you can now read it on the website.
