Friday, September 25, 2009

Tech Frustrations, Take Three

I am really lucky. My Florida D-I-L is a computer maven, and she is willing to come when I cry for help. Her husband – my younger son - told me it was okay to download Internet Explorer 8. “It works better.” Famous last words. Ever since I did that, my D-I-L has made two trips to my house to undo the damage that the download has done. My new rule is never mess with a functioning computer program that this senior citizen is using without hassle. It seems Internet 8 is not compatible with many programs I use such as Word, My Space, Blogger, etc and without the aide of my D-I-L, I still could not cut and paste my blog onto My Space or Blogspot.

The computer techs at My Space could not help me find all the missing comments people made on my blog, but my DIL found them. She has the patience of a saint, a skill necessary to be a computer maven. She actually reads directions carefully and then follows them without taking short cuts – another helpful skill when fixing things. Even better, she understood the secret language the computer geeks a.k.a tech support people at My Space were telling me in their auto response. Their latest unhelpful letter was different from their usual one where they tell me to clean my computer. (I take this as a personal insult. It is clean. I dust it and use alcohol wipes on the keys. Hubby is in charge of cleaning the cookies. He gets rid of them often because, according to what My Space techs usually write me, my computer is diabetic and can’t tolerate them. My husband detoxes our computers at least once a week with various spy-searching programs. Cookies, I am usually told by My Space are the root of all-evil. I am beginning to think having a cookie in my computer is responsible for every problem that occurs on My Space.)

However, when the blog comments disappeared into cyberspace, this time My Space said it had something to do with I think the word is caches. To me Cache is an expensive dress store with clothes designed for anorexic females. Fortunately, my Florida DIL knew what they were talking about and immediately corrected the problem. And like magic, my readers comments appeared! After she left yesterday, I tried to open something on a new web site. My computer told me Adobe is not responding to my requests and I need a special disk to reinstall it. Now, I have to wait until my D-I-L has another free day to come and find where Adobe is hiding in my hard drive.

I have one question for all of you that don’t have free computer mavens a stone’s throw away. Is it possible to ever figure out how to fix these messes by yourself, or do you choose between food and functioning computers?

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