CYBERSNARK'S BLOG

Cybersnark

My eyes are bleeding.
Monday, May 15, 2006

No, it's not the bluehands.

My mom's computer has. . . I don't know what. Caught a virus, shorted out, popped a connection, died from extreme old age (it was built in the mid-90s). . .

I tried to turn it on this afternoon after getting home from work. It konked out before even booting up. Rebooted, then it told me that these graphics settings won't work with this monitor (the monitor we've had for about a year). I tried to fix it in control panel, but that just makes it hang up and need rebooting again.

It's currently stuck at 640 by 480 resolution, with 16 colours, and is flickering in an eye-searing fashion. I've been sitting here not 10 minutes and my head is throbbing. I need to scroll sideways to read a single line of Email, and pages reload multiple times (it needs to reload once for every image on the page). Letters are about half an inch tall (too big even for my nearly sightless mother), and it's trying to access a dial-up account that hasn't existed for about 3 years (mom has DSL).

This machine was never stable in the best of times; takes about 15 minutes to boot up, will hang up if I ask it to do more than one operation at a time, pauses every half-hour or so to frantically try to access drive A (for no discernable reason), needs over a minute to open a "properties" tab, has wonky colour settings, and occasionally crashes for no apparent reason.

I've delivered an ultimatum: either a new computer or internet access for my own still-healthy, (relatively) blindingly fast machine (it has it's own gremlin, but it actually seems to like me), but I have zero bargaining power here (mom is as self-reliant as she is self-centred, and she has no reason to listen to me).

Mom says she'll call the computer guy tomorrow (read: sometime this month. Maybe). He'll no doubt be able to restore some basic functionality and she'll keep using this one. It's fine for her needs (basic Email, solitare, and Wordperfect), which means. . . I'm humped.

What all this comes down to is I may not be here for a while. See y'all later.

COMMENTS

Monday, May 15, 2006 3:47 PM

COPILOT


Ummmmmmm!?!?!
Craziness!!!!!


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