Is it really only Wednesday?

Monday night against my better judgment I installed a Windows update. Everything seemed fine which totally surprised me. You see I have had problems before with installing Windows updates and have vowed to never install them again. But I noticed that the last update I installed was back in 2009. So I thought "Why not"?

Big. Mistake.

I woke up sick on Tuesday so I turned on the computer to let my boss know that I would not be in to work. I was greeted by a screen that was a lovely shade of blue. Not! Start-up repair failed, System restore points could not be found, and neither could the last good configuration. I realized that I would probably need to reinstall Windows. I had my files backed up, well most of them. The most recent files were not on the backup. I walked away from the computer to try to come to grips with having to lose my most recent photos, music etc. Plus I just didn't feel like dealing with it at the time.

I am glad I didn't just reinstall right away. I was able to start the computer in Safe Mode and backup my most current files. I was also able to uninstall the Windows updates. Go me!

I restarted the computer and it booted right up. Yay! Except now I get random errors that are probably from missing files etc. Looks like I will probably need to reinstall Windows after all.

So how has your week been?

aaaand she's back!

Well I hope I am back.

I am really having a love/hate relationship with this whole computer. We ended up having to take the laptop back to the store. They immediately switched it out for a new one but then told us that the only way it would not happen again was for them to "optimize" it. We were told there was a conflict with the software that Dell has pre-installed and that if we did not want the same thing to happen to the new computer then we needed to pay extra. That there was nothing we could do at home to fix it on our own. I think that's kind of a rip off. I would think that a computer should work correctly right out of the box. So we paid our extra money for them to "optimize" it and we brought it home. So far there is no blue screen but the user they created was corrupted. I took it back yet again today and they only created a new user. If that was all that was needed I could have done it myself but the guy on the phone said that to fix it there was nothing that could be done on my end. I also checked all the stuff they were supposed to do when they "optimize" and it was not done. So who knows what they did.

I am not feeling too confident with the tech support that this company provides. The girl helping us yesterday and today did not even know how to explore windows. She asked me to show her. And yesterday one of the techs yelled out "does anyone know how to change a phone number for a dial up connection? Where do you go to set up the Internet?" Of course it was the old guy of the bunch that knew where to go. Maybe I should have charged them $40 for my service.

So to take my mind off of all this computer stuff I decided it was time to get to scrapping. I really wanted to do the color combo challenge for last week (new one was posted today) but I was finding it really hard to find colors that match the posted colors, but I found some that may work. I am now thinking that maybe I don't understand the directions. I looked at all the pages that were posted and people were using colors that were not the same. Colors like bright orange, bright blue and white instead of the creamy vanilla. Here are the colors that I had to chose from. When I printed them out they weren't very bright and are darker than on screen. If I can use similar colors and not those posted then I think the challenge would be much easier. But then it wouldn't be following the rules would it.

genuine article

Yesterday was my birthday. The hubby got me a wonderful surprise. My very own iPod Touch. Thing is...I couldn't get it to work. I couldn't even get past the first step to set it up. That first step being to update to the latest iTunes. I updated but when I tried to synch the iPod the computer wouldn't read it. So I restarted the computer. After that iTunes wouldn't even open and all of a sudden my Windows XP was no longer genuine. The computer was totally messed up. It looks like I will have to reinstall Windows and I don't even know if that will fix the problem. The computer is old and I am embarrassed to tell you just how old it was. The system was top of the line years ago. Back when 40GB hard drives were all the rage and 256MB RAM was considered fast. I knew it was only a matter of time before the system was at its end. I just did not expect it to be last night.

So....after work today we stopped by the store. Yep. I am writing this from my new Dell laptop. It is red and it is fast. The Internet can actually be considered high speed now. Maybe now I will actually enjoy my computer time; get those pictures uploaded and actually be able to save my pictures after editing. Imagine that.