Computers – love ’em, hate ’em
Computers bring us so much. Just to take one obvious example, they bring this blog to you and your comments to me. They bring us the ability to bank online, get news from anywhere in the world, and buy just about anything without leaving home.
They bring us social media and its contagions, and an easier way for abusers to stalk and for criminals to bilk. They make it less likely that we get together in the real world, although that’s up to us.
And they bring us the kind of frustration I’ve been feeling in the last day or two, when my effort to diagnose and fix one problem with my computer by changing a single seemingly-innocuous setting caused a cascade of other problems that were far more serious and which wouldn’t be fixed even by getting a new computer. To explain what happened would be almost as tedious as going through it, so I’ll spare you unless I need to ask you all for help in the future. I think I’m on the way to fixing it; let’s just say it’s half-fixed. But that took about ten hours yesterday and additional time today.
It brought home to me once again – not that I needed reminding – how dependent we’ve become on computers.
I can sympathize. I’m sort of the defacto IT guy for my business, my friends, and my family. As such I’ve dealt with all sorts of issues over the decades.
I generally have built and configured the vast majority of Windows and Linux (mostly Debian) systems for myself and others over the years. I even have some limited experience with Mac systems, although I really dislike working with them since they tend to be somewhat arcane when it comes to diagnosing and dealing with problems compared to other OSes.
Even so, there are times when even I’ve been stumped so badly that I’ve had to resort to full wipe and reinstalls of the OS when I’ve been unable to isolate an underlying issue.
One thing that can help once you’ve got a system up and running in a stable condition is you create a recovery image of the drive that you have the OS on. With modern Windows systems you typically save this to a larger thumb drive which are relatively inexpensive these days even for 512GB ones. That way in the wost case scenario you can always restore your PC back to a stable state without having to do a full reinstall.
neo:
Best wishes.
I’ve sometimes found ChatGPT useful for computer crap stuff.
Being OCD, I back up my computer incrementally without fail daily. In about 15 minutes, time for a coffee, you can back out of almost anything, even if you don’t understand what you did.
Chester Peake:
Unfortunately, that sort of thing wouldn’t have helped.
Huxley: Please read my post from the previous day. Who owns Chat? How do you contact them and tell them they are stealing what is not theirs?
Geez…this has to be the worst post I’ve seen here. ‘Oh, something terrible happened the other day, but I’ll spare you the details.’ OK – thanks, I guess?!
So a recovery image or incremental backups wouldn’t work. Guess System Restore wouldn’t have worked either then. Weird. Hardware issue? New computer wouldn’t even fix the problem?! Ditto on the Weird. App/program issue?
I occasionally take pics of my Taskbar & pinned apps in Start menu in case I ever need to do a clean install.
I am reminded of an interaction between my uncle and his son, my cousin. Like me, my uncle was indifferent to the inner workings of a computer. He and I viewed the computer as a tool, nothing more. One time his son, an EE who owned a software company, was installing something on his father’s computer. Frustrated at his father’s indifference to the details of what he was doing, my cousin commented, “I don’t see how you could be my father.” 🙂
Recently I was doing a minor update on my copy of Calibre- changing a “tag” (History, Literature, Economics, etc.) name. I ended up erasing the “tag” name when I was intending to change its name. While I had that information in a backup, it would have been very problematic to import the backup (sparing you the details), so I ended up typing in the “tag” name where I saw a blank.
Huxley: Please read my post from the previous day. Who owns Chat? How do you contact them and tell them they are stealing what is not theirs?
Anne:
I’m not sure of your post from yesterday. I know that Microsoft owns a big share of OpenAI and I don’t trust Microsoft. Elon Musk has distanced himself from OpenAI for legitimate reasons.
The issues of AI and theft are complicated, but not limited to Microsoft.
Karmi:
To relieve your angst, I’ll add this: the computer problem that started the ball rolling got fixed fairly quickly. But in the process, my emails stopped recognizing me, considered me a bot and a threat even on other computers, and blocked me. I’ve got it half fixed now.
Thanks neo! Sounds terrible – like The Terminator type of ‘Stuff‘!? 😉