My Windows Pain Continues

Desktop background photo titled ‘Through A Glass, Darkly’ by Frank A Hilario. Image includes error message on a failure to connect to the Internet

I Let It Worry Itself To Death

13 March – The pastoral text / cellphone SMS of Fr Reuter is this: Our Lord was crowned with thorns. When you talk to him in prayer, you remove one thorn from his tortured brow.

The story of Christ on the road to Calvary continues. The story of my Windows pain continues from 12 March as I write this 15 March.

The Hilarios’ PC

12 March. It’s seven in the morning; our Epson Stylus CX3700 will not print, and Graciela, 4^th Year High, needs to print for her homework. (She prints in the other PC, with the HP, but laser, not color, and is unhappy.) I do not suspect a virus, Trojan or spy software. First, I suspect a USB malfunction – we have two USB hubs on the H (Hilarios’) PC, and the CX is connected via USB, and this PC is about 6 years old – it survives with lots of new components, like a new monitor (MAG Innovision Flat and new hard disk – so I insert / reinsert the USB printer cord into the new USB card at the back of the CPU (central processing unit) tower assembly – and try all the old and new USB ports, all 8 of them, plus all 8 slots of the 2 USB hubs I bought. Still will not print. Windows Help and Support is no help at all. The setup software for the CX too is unable to recognize the printer – it doesn’t continue to the happy ending that I know is a message that ends thus: ‘Successfully installed.’ For more than a dozen tries, there is no ending, only another beginning.

I can get tired and cranky, but I don’t. It’s a choice, a decision I made about 10 years ago but one that took years to come to fruition. You don’t change overnight just because you want to, you decide to. You have excess baggage on your trip to heaven on earth and you may not realize that. Excess baggage can be like this: I forgive you, but I can’t forget the hurt you gave me. Or, I deserve better than this. Or, I’m so smart, why ain’t I so rich? When comes the time you blame no one but yourself and then you do forgive yourself, then you begin your own journey just like Dorothy’s in the Yellow Brick Road in the Wizard of Oz. You are on the way to some enlightenment.

I’m a freelance writer, editor, publisher, and I spend 97% of my time on the PC. So now you know that years before, if faced with a situation like a malfunctioning PC, I would have badmouthed Microsoft, Surecom, the USB maker, the supplier of the generic (IBM-compatible) CPU tower, Edimax (maker of the Ethernet PCI adapter card), and most everybody else. They don’t make things like they used to! Ah, but not anymore. I can tell myself: Get used to it. Remember Murphy’s Law: If anything can go wrong, it will. So, it would be wrong to go wrong yourself!

It’s complicated, so I will simplify it and say that after analyzing / reanalyzing things, I decide to format the master hard disk and leave the master slave hard disk intact (that’s where all our files are, including installers). That calls for another half day of installing routines, countless of them, including typing serial numbers and my name and company all over again. But like I said before, it’s not a pain – it’s a pleasure. The pain’s gone if you don’t look at what you’re doing and instead focus on what for you’re doing it.

15 March: I can now report a happy ending of the story of the H PC. The printer is working fine, thank you: printing, scanning, copying, reducing, enlarging. What more can I ask for?

The Office’s PC

13 March. The other, the O (office’s) PC suddenly will not connect to the Internet via the Hilarios’ Smart WiFi / Smart BRO connection – and I don’t know why. This PC has been connecting before this, in fact for the last 2 years. The image you see, is a screen capture of my desktop on this PC, with the Windows part saying ‘This page cannot be displayed’ and my photograph from Los Baños as desktop background saying essentially the same thing. Two can tell a common story.

In fact, as I write this, 15 March, 1100hr, the O PC still can’t get an Internet connection while the H PC continues to enjoy one – and their CPU towers are only a foot apart (they share a Surecom router). I have reformatted the hard disk and reinstalled Windows and all those software I listed on my blog for 12 March (uploaded 14 March), and still no Internet. Windows Help and Support offers nothing better than clicks that lead to nowhere. I am ready to give up for now and bring the CPU tower to the technician, which means Prologue Computers some 3 km away. The last thing I have just tried is to use the router-to-CPU cord/link that’s working with the H PC to the O PC – still, no Internet. I guess it’s the hardware, not Windows; we’ll see when I bring that thing to the technician. The O PC is a little older than the H PC, so age matters, I suppose.

But the pain of continual PC troubles? I haven’t noticed any. Have you?