I just brought home a shiny new computer. Yeah me! It’s about 14 thousand generations later than my (now) old one. It’s a P4 with enough RAM and a big enough hard drive to, to, to I don’t know but it’s a lot.
I didn’t get a monitor because I still don’t know enough about them. How fast a refresh rate do I need? And I have my old small one that still works.
It has Windows XP.
I boot it up, and as soon as windows gets started, my monitor go wackie on me. Oh shit. I borrow a friends monitor, and it works fine. I switch monitors after everything’s running, and mine works fine. Ok, maybe its just the booting up, or the setting up. I reboot, and wackie monitor. So I switch back to my friend’s and decrease the resolution, and my monitor works after that. Ok, you expect unexpected problems when dealing with Gates.
So, everything’s working beautifully. I try to connect to the school’s LAN, and get nothing. ok, ok, think, that’s right, add one of the other protocols. That works. I’m connected to the LAN even better than before. The computer can “see” a couple crucial computers on the net that it couldn’t before. Really happy because now I can do (almost) everything from home. I start installing programs. Like Palm desktop, MS Office, everythings fine. I install a couple browser filter things that block web bugs and cookies. I open Internet Explorer and I can’t access the web! I check the computer’s I’d mapped and they’re gone, too! My computer can’t see anything outside.
To make a short story not too long, I change every setting I can think of. I remove every client, protocol, whatever. I uninstall the network card and let it be re-detected. Nothing. I do everything again in different order, because I can’t think of what else to do. Nothing. It’s getting late, I’m tired, and I’ve fucked everything up so now I can’t keep working on my thesis at home. I remember that XP has this new restore function. I check and there are a few time points from when I think the connections were working. I restore them, and no go.
I reinstall Windows XP, which of course deletes everything I’d set up, but at least I know that should work. Well, I boot up and my monitor is wackie again! I’d forgotten about that. As it turns out, with the right adjustments, I can see about half of everything on the screen in 15 repetitions across the screen with every other line gone, but I can sort of see the [next] button, so I make my way through the set up, on a few I randomly hit keys, then tab or return, hoping to agree to whatever is proposed. Agreeing to the usage liscense was the hardest part, but finally I get to the desktop and realize I don’t know how to decrease the resolution without seeing the screen. I right click to bring up the control window, but it’s hopeless.
Go to sleep (4am), hoping to borrow a monitor again the next day. Get woken up by a call from my friend with the monitor who asks if I’ve been having trouble with the network, too? It seems it went down last night! Arrrrrrrrrrrrgh! I won’t even tell you how I managed to mess up the settings so that I could access the web, but not the LAN, which took another few years off my life in frustration. If only I’d known it was the network that was FUBAR, not me. (Who’d have thought?)
Now I can just be frustrated with having to learn the functions/locatioins/keys of a new OS because Gates insists on making every new OS seem “new.”
Y’all don’t give a goat’s felched fart about this, but I just had to get it off my chest.
Thank you,
PC