Grumpa Joe's Place

I have lost all of my confidence in computers. In the last twenty seven days, I have had to reload the operating system on this miserable lap top three times. Each time, I began to recover and make forward progress when it would happen again. Needless to say, I’ve lost a lot of stuff. I have a back up from before the first incident, but have you ever tried to recover data from a Microsoft formatted back up? I thought all I had to do was to perform a restore function, and all would be sweet. I learned that restore only restores the program stuff. Data is excluded.

After a month, I found my contact list with all of my friends e-mail addresses. Yesterday, I worked for four hours to learn how to recover them. After that amount of time, I had successfully recovered ten contacts. Because they were entered in Windows Vista, and I am now on Windows 7 there is a problem. If I still had Vista loaded on my PC it would have gone smoothly, but I don’t even want the Vista disk in my house any more. Windows seven does not know how to accept data from a Vista back-up file.

I found a work around and can now transfer the addresses, but it might still be easier to retype them all. Has anyone figured out how to print a list of contacts from the Windows Mail Contact List? If so, I would like to know how to do it. I need a paper back-up to circumvent another dilemma.

1.)    My problems began immediately after I downloaded several security updates. The key board began skipping characters. I spent six hours on the phone with a nice guy from Dell computers in India. It cost $130 to learn that I had to reload the operating software. The pc began to work good again.

2.)    A week later, after I had begun to rebuild my e-mail contact list and learned that restore does not recover the data, I turned on the computer. I left as I usually do to have breakfast. On my return, the machine was downloading updates. I had forgotten to turn off the automatic update feature.   The key board began sticking again. This time I made up my mind not to spend another $130.00 to fix the problem. I read web site after web site trying different approaches to fix the problem. There are hundreds of reports about this defect since Vista first came out. After a week, I was really demoralized when it came to me in a dream.  I would simply uninstall every update since all the trouble started. It took over an hour of continuous button pushing to do it, but I uninstalled one hundred and twenty five updates without restarting the computer. That is a mistake, a very big mistake. When I restarted, the pc began starting up, and shutting down automatically. I figured this to be normal since I did uninstall 125 updates, and it needed a restart to activate each one. I just thought it would have to do this routine one hundred and twenty-five times to take effect. I let the machine run over-night. It was still looping in the morning.  I let it run another ten hours before I killed it.

3.)    I restarted the machine, thinking the problem would resolve itself with a reboot. No such luck. I performed all the diagnostics I could through DOS. All the components were sound.  The machine kept booting up into the start-up, shut down loop.

I called my son Mike for help. He confirmed all the same things I did. He tried re-loading the operating system from my original disk. It wouldn’t boot. Then, the disc would not eject. Mike played with it until he finally got the disc to come out.

Mike talked me into installing Windows 7. We did, and I lost my e-mail list, and what little work content I produced, again.

That is the story of why I haven’t posted or cartooned very much in September. One of my cartoons is titled “A Very, Very, Very, Sad Song.”  The gypsy is playing the violin for me now.

Another old problem has returned with Windows 7. I had a problem with the touch pad in Vista which I fixed by downloading a new driver which allowed me to disable the touchpad. The problem is back. Does Microsoft or Dell learn anything? Ever?

I know why Bill Gates is being so charitable. He is feeling pangs of guilt about creating Window

Filed under: Hobbies, Motivation, Satire, Science, Society | Tagged: Bill Gates, Dell, India, Microsoft, Microsoft Windows, Operating system, Windows 7, Windows Vista |