I have spent the whole day in my fucking pyjamas. No not the ones that I wear during romantic interludes and not because I'm that attached to them, despite the fact that they are very comfy and cool but because it was apparent, the Dell wasn't well. My morning habit is to wake very early - make a cuppa, crank up the old battleaxe, check the blogs and emails, then shower, dress and get on with the day. Only if I'm happily distracted by some overseas Skype pal am I ever in me jimmy jams after 7:00am.
After a few spits and squeaks and numerous restarts, Ctrl Alt Deletes, Task Manager manipulations, Disk Cleanups and Defrags and even a half hour cooling off period and some serious power point poker, the bitch decided to give up the ghost for about half an hour hastening panic among the humans in the house, "Shit, shit, shit, shit . . motherfucking PC. I only wanted you to last until the end of January . . fuck! fuck!" from me (practising my best Four Weddings and a Funeral 'fuck') to accusatory "What the fuck did you do mum? If I can't get my photos on a disc, I'm fucked! I need them for Fringelet's birthday present!" from the normally quite politely spoken DrummerBoy who's romance collage for the Fringelet's birthday relied on him downloading a disk of carefully chosen snooxy photos.
I managed to get the old girl resurected but with a few provisos:
- She started slower than frozen treacle
- She refused to let me load a new version of Nero
- Simply wouldn't allow Quicktime
- Stalled every 3 CD's due to exhaustion
- Positively went into a spin over MSN and Hotmail
- Made a totally inappropriate buzzy/farty noise if I moved the mouse too fast
- Will not open Word most times and when she does, all the drop down menus appear to jump all over the screen
- Simply turned off the screen ad hoc if I swore at her
I wouldn't mind in a month or so . . . I know I need a new PC and this six year old Trojan doesn't really owe me anything but after a $470 ignition replacement in the Hoonda and $270 of new brakes on top of the Christmas spendfest and exorbitant council rates, the last thing I can afford is $2000 for a decent PC. She has to last until 31st January when I can clean out the iMac of ClareBear's images and optimise the whole shebang. Lets face it, I only use my home PC for Internet and Skype so the Mac should do me for a few more months.
The rest of the day was spent 'nursing' files onto a CD so that when the old crone finally carks it, I have my photos and files intact. (For God's sake don't tell her I called her a Crone . . she already takes half an hour to download a You Tube vid!). The big problem besides a cancerous processor and 512 RAM is hard drive memory. DrummerBoy has so many narcissistic Aktor jpegs, iTunes, Winamp and band (not banned- although I didn't watch them all!) video files that even copying them to disk took veritable hours while he plonked along with his gesture of romance for the girlf! (which looked very pretty when he'd finished with it by the by!)
So for those of you on dial up . . .trust me . . your PC's are faster than mine!
Maybe Ms Dell has been talking to this guy . . .
Do you use bad language?
ReplyDeleteModern technology is wonderful - when it works! Otherwise it is a heap of junk.
Have a better day tomorrow.
Sounds like quite a lot of these issues could be due to free disk space.
ReplyDeleteCheck the size of your C: drive and ensure that at least 10% of the total space is still free. If it's less than that, then delete some of the docs that you have backed up to CD.
Think of it like one of those little tile puzzles you get that have one empty space and you need to move around to make the correct image - if you don't have that one free space, then you can't do anything!
An option to think about when you are upgrading would be to purchase a pair of 250GB external hard drives for Drummerboy and Clarebear - they could keep any of their docs on those, they can stay beside the PC when in use, but they can also pick them up and take them away if they want to share the docs with someone else. This would allow you to keep control of the docs on the main PC and ensure you never run out of space again.
I know it would be an additional expense, but the prices have dropped a lot, so you should be able to pick up a pair for under $200 AUD.
Do you have different pairs of pyjamas for doing different things?
ReplyDeleteMy PC is the best. It is from 2001 and it is still alive more or less.
ReplyDeleteGrannymar: I have a colourful turn of phrase when the mood strikes me but I can behave when required. I guess the old girl is on her last legs!
ReplyDeleteElly: thanks I did all that yesterday and it seems to be a bit better. It's the ol processing power that's just tired. I was finally able to burn all the big files to CD. We're definitely in the running for a new one I just want to make it last for a couple of months. Thanks for the tips tho!
Anonymous: (I hate anonymous commenters by the way!) Well of course! I have my washing up pyjamas, my hanging over the fence talking to neighbours pyjamas (which require me to allso wear rollers and carry a mop). Then there's the 'sleep over' pyjamas and the cats pyjamas!
Ropi: I've had this one since 2001 as well but it's been worked hard thanks to three people using it! But I have had to put in a new hard drive since then and replace the motherboard. Keep yours well maintained and it might last you a little longer! We manage a lot of images and videos on it so they take up heaps of space.
HAHA cute video, sounds like you have some control back and hope it lasts the planned distance! External hardrives are a great idea, I couldn't live without them (or my computer couldn't) and we have three of both in this house.
ReplyDelete2000$? Now come on, be optimistic, a brand spankers decent dell including monitor is going to be about 1200 tops.
ReplyDeletehttp://www1.ap.dell.com/content/products/features.aspx/desktops_better?c=au&cs=audhs1&l=en&s=dhs
Unless you hate Dell.
Ryan: I've been looking at the Dell multi media one today, it's a whopper of a PC for well under $2000 plus delivery and a 24" monitor etc. I'm also looking at Mac Minis but once you put the speakers and screen on,they get a bit exe.
ReplyDeleteMs Dell is behaving quite well today. Still a lot of money given my billage this month! It'll have to wait until at least Feb. Thanks for the link tho.
To give you an idea, the Dell is 6 years old and has had 2 major repairs. The Mac is 4 5 years old and nada . . nuthin . . .just needs a good clean out and a new keyboard so I might get away with it once I clean it out.
Now, I'm just waiting for the BenchWarmer and Kahlerisms to put their best foot forward and all the geeks have had a go!
Cheers :)