For those who’ve wondered what happened to me, here’s the long and short of it.
My desktop PC went into death throes and left me stranded with only an older laptop which wasn’t anti-virus protected. I had to buy a new computer. I got a new laptop, which had Windows 10, of course. The data from my desktop was in the hands of the Geeks, trying to recover as much as possible. My writing life was on that hard drive.
Well, poor, apologetic Geeks saved as much as possible to my external hard drive, but of my dozens of file folders, they could only retrieve A thru C. That meant I only had one novel, out of five, saved in its entirety. Four novels existed now in bits and pieces on flash drives or in hard copy.
That’s four FINISHED novels awaiting final revisions, plus the entire plotline arc of the Wisher’s World Series.
Now you know why I’ve ben MIA. But, it gets better. Because of the new laptop and the old one, we had to get a new WiFi package upgrade (at a reduced price thought), a new modem and new router. It didn’t work. We had to wait several days for a tech to come to the house.
After that glitch was fixed (the new router was no good and had to be replaced), my new laptop decided to scare me half to death and go into hide mode where I could neither turn it off or turn it on. Yes, the gremlins had taken over my office and were playing hardball. A quick trip back to the Geeks had me up and running again. It seems that my computer has a major hibernation moe that required determination for circumvention of internal sleep mode.
That brought me to a few days ago. I was so stressed out by then and so fed up with trying to decipher Windows 10 that I let the new laptop sit and wait for me to deal with it. I went into distraction and escape mode for a few days. Today, I began tackling the arduous process of learning Windows 10, installing Office 10 again, and trying to get the app installed that will allow me to listen to music and watch movies on this new computer.
Oh, yes, that’s the other frustration. It seems that many of the new computers don’t come with media player anymore. You have to purchase one so you can use the DVD drive on said machine.
Now can you understand why communications hae been so difficulty for me lately? I pray you don’t have the problems I’ve had to deal with lately. Hopefully you won’t have to customize vision/audio settings to accommodate needs. Just finding the settings on Win10 that you want is a visual nightmare. It was not really designed to be user-friendly for the visually impaired.
So, that’s my current tale. Disaster in terms of time and data lost. Drama for the frustration and hair-pulling I’ve been faced with.
So, I’ve had my rant. I’ve gotten little done beyond that. I’ve gotten one short story revised–one written as part of a novel during November’s NaNo. I’ll be subbing it shortly to one of those lovely markets that actually pay for stories.
In the meantime, I’ll kep working on learning this new computer and its infuriating system. I’ll try hard to get back to you sometimes during this coming week with something other than grumbling.
It you have personal horror stories of your journey through Computerland, drop them into a comment below.
Have a great week, folks.
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