There's hope after all
I bought a new laptop a couple weeks ago on eBay - an IBM Thinkpad R51, if anyone's interested. It has a huge screen with high-res graphics and the price was right so that's what I went for.
The machine arrived sans power cord - the supply was there, but the cord was not.... Oh, boy, I thought. Here we go.... I sent this carefully worded note to the seller, the ghist of which was, "Was this an oversight?", figuring that it wasn't, honestly. Well, I get this note back, "Definitely an oversight, I'll put one in the mail right away." Cool.
I had a spare cord, so I got busy loading up my software on the new machine and playing with it. It worked great up until I started working with Quicken. Now that piece of software is what some people would call "finiky", and I would call, "a total pain in the neck", but the church uses it for its books and I'm the treasurer, so it's gotta be on the machine. And its gotta work. Period.
It did, mostly. But there is this one function that a treasurer simply has to be able to perform. Print checks. That didn't work. I went to the Web site. I tried installing and reinstalling the software, the printer drivers. I tried installing them in reverse order. I tried to load the software in 'Safe Mode'. No go.
I spent 4 hours of my life on a chat conversation with three different Quicken reps. The machine as now been rebooted as many times in three days as I would expect to see happen in approximate a decade. And it's getting slower.....and slower.....and slower. Other software stops working right.
I uninstall a whole lot of stuff to try to get things back to some form of normalcy. It gets worse. I'm approaching two decades worth of reboots at this point. Finally, I do the obvious and look in the system log and there it is.....disk errors - bad blocks. Now I know I'm in for it. I send another carefully worded note to the seller asking for his plan to help me out, thinking, "Yah, right." Do you know that the guy is sending me a new drive? Wow.
Buy laptops from Jay's Computer parts, folks. He's great. He's helping to restore my cynical heart, too. Thanks, Jay.
The machine arrived sans power cord - the supply was there, but the cord was not.... Oh, boy, I thought. Here we go.... I sent this carefully worded note to the seller, the ghist of which was, "Was this an oversight?", figuring that it wasn't, honestly. Well, I get this note back, "Definitely an oversight, I'll put one in the mail right away." Cool.
I had a spare cord, so I got busy loading up my software on the new machine and playing with it. It worked great up until I started working with Quicken. Now that piece of software is what some people would call "finiky", and I would call, "a total pain in the neck", but the church uses it for its books and I'm the treasurer, so it's gotta be on the machine. And its gotta work. Period.
It did, mostly. But there is this one function that a treasurer simply has to be able to perform. Print checks. That didn't work. I went to the Web site. I tried installing and reinstalling the software, the printer drivers. I tried installing them in reverse order. I tried to load the software in 'Safe Mode'. No go.
I spent 4 hours of my life on a chat conversation with three different Quicken reps. The machine as now been rebooted as many times in three days as I would expect to see happen in approximate a decade. And it's getting slower.....and slower.....and slower. Other software stops working right.
I uninstall a whole lot of stuff to try to get things back to some form of normalcy. It gets worse. I'm approaching two decades worth of reboots at this point. Finally, I do the obvious and look in the system log and there it is.....disk errors - bad blocks. Now I know I'm in for it. I send another carefully worded note to the seller asking for his plan to help me out, thinking, "Yah, right." Do you know that the guy is sending me a new drive? Wow.
Buy laptops from Jay's Computer parts, folks. He's great. He's helping to restore my cynical heart, too. Thanks, Jay.
posted by Cliff at 6:49 PM
2 Comments:
hey, i just started one of these thingies. thought you might want to know. i've been reading your blog all invisible like until now, i couldn't comment.
btw, i can't figure out how to work some of the stuff on this. i might randomly ask you questions once i figure out how to word them. :)
Emily,
Thanks for leaving a response! Welcome to the game. I'd be happy to help, though I would say that I am pretty much a neophyte as well.
Cliff
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