success at last
I’m back, didja miss me? I re-reinstalled XP and this time followed the very excellent suggestions of TweakHound , which made all the difference.
In summary, the very erratic performance problems I was having with my new Dell Vostro laptop turned out to be caused by a phantom keyboard event, once per second, which was easily fixed by re-seating the keyboard cable. The XP problems at reinstall seemed to come from settings that persisted from the original installation. When I re-reinstalled, I deleted my partitions before starting, which gave me a clean install. Or almost. Certainly cleaner, and without having to reformat the whole thing.
So far my only peeve with the finished product is that at boot, I get the screen that allows me 30 seconds to pick from my choice of operating systems…but both choices are Windows XP. There should be only one choice and that screen shouldn’t pop up. And 30 seconds, what where they thinking? Do I have all day to sit around booting my computer???
Considering that the whole deal boots in about 60 seconds, I’m not really too choked up about it. And I bet TweakHound can help me deal with it.
[Edit: easily fixed. Go through start, control panel (classic view), system, advanced, startup and recovery, settings, edit. Make a backup copy of your boot loader file there. Then mess with it---if you want the screen and the option to specify an OS, you can change the default time of 30 to some lower number. If you actually have only one OS, just delete the spurious choices. ]
fixed, and yet so broken
So, after badmouthing Dell support, I decided to just email them. Carlos answered overnight. He told me to run the diagnostics utility, which found nothing, and then to try re-seating the keyboard cable. This involved taking a few things apart and I was feeling so dumb by Sunday morning that I asked T. to do it, et voila. All the symptoms were cured.
At least, I think all symptoms were cured. I can’t test the Meditech problem because, surprise surprise, I broke my computer. Something about the re-install of XP was not clean enough and now there are all kinds of issues happening with initializing and no way my super-duper-secure-hospital-network is going to let me connect. Neither is Dragon Naturally Speaking going to run happily. The whole re-install thing which I didn’t have to do has been ruinous.
I am not a happy camper. But I’m mostly happy with Dell. It’s not their fault I blamed Windows for my problems before I should have. I sure blame Windows now! Sheesh. I’m going to have to wipe the entire drive and start clean. T. is advocating putting 2000 on here instead of XP…we’ll see.
I got lots of hits in the past few days. Endless dispossessed armies of people are roaming cyberspace trying to find answers to their computer problems, I suspect. A goodly number are still trying to discover what Dell’s TouchCheck feature does. I think I’ll go join them—we’ll be the dark hooded ones slinking around the edges of the campfires, trying to get a good look over the shoulders of the bright and shiny happy campers.
the aftermath
The aftermath of Thanksgiving runs in a hundred directions.
My daughter announces her engagement. That’s a good one. And I love Kevin, so no argument there.
The gluten-free pie crust was such a success (and I am thinking here of g/f bread which is not a success, no matter what I try) that I had to make another pie, pecan this time, which is of course delicious and sweet enough to shatter teeth…I traded in about half my pancreas to have pie for lunch, and I am now damned for good and all.
The leftovers were sternly dealt with. The turkey is soup, or frozen. The cornbread is transforming as we speak into fresh eggs, or frozen–a little of each. We’re all frozen, relatively speaking. It’s raining and it’s about 40 degrees, which by our standards as you may have gathered is cold. And I can deal with it, because it’ll be done by Monday.
I spent all day yesterday Xmas shopping, roaming the infinite wastelands of Messrs. Amazon Dot Com and Overstock and ThinkGeek…took me a good long time, but no parking space. I’m lazy that way.
And then the computer…if you’ve been around IRL, you know that T. is my go-to guy for computer crises. I used to be pretty good with what I had to do, but since my marriage we’ve become a lot more complex in terms of networks, and it’s become a lot more convenient for me to wave my little hanky and cry Help Help, and everything is miraculously fixed by the time I finish cooking breakfast for the guy.
But I haven’t cooked breakfast for a long time. And my brand new Dell Vostro notebook has developed a problem about which neither one of us had anything useful to say. The touchpad stopped working reliably; I could get around that by disabling Dell’s “touchcheck” feature, which nobody in the known universe can define. But then the alt-tab switching stopped working. This was sidestepped by activating MS’s powertoy alt-tab feature, and similarly then when Windows lost focus, the powertoy TweakUI.
None of these sops fixed the big problem with Meditech, though. Meditech is a medical records fixture, and I work with it, and it’s not negotiable. Medical records software is notorious for its dinosaur flexibility and motility, but Meditech in particular, I am convinced, claims as its immediate predecessor a complex system of weights and pulleys and sharp implements that laboriously chip letters into rocks. I end up exercising my rusty vocal cords every day by about 9:30 a.m., in an utterly profane way, and it just goes on from there. T. couldn’t figure it out, and that’s where I run out of belief in mankind.
So today I blocked off the morning. I made backups. I fed and watered the pets and livestock. I left a trail of g/f breadcrumbs. I reinstalled Windows XP. And yes, I rebooted 47 times. And I fixed nothing. The problems persisted. T. finally booted the computer in Linux and found that an unidentified key or key combination was firing about once per second which pretty much explains everything except how to fix it. We couldn’t discover any single key responsible and we found that other people had recorded the same problem, a few, very recently…but the Vostro is a new package from Dell, very recent.
So. Such shuffling of computers you’ve never seen. I’m back on my old reliable chained-to-the-desk behemoth, which is fine except that I don’t remember the keyboard layout, and it can’t handle my working speech recognition software. The broken Gateway, which did handle Dragon Naturally Speaking, I’ve reclaimed from T., despite its broken hinges and unreliable connection to its own display, and he’s take over the ultra-crap little notebook that’s about a hundred years old but was previously sufficient to deliver my downloaded dictation files.
I’m off to dive deep into Dell tech support–which is a horrendous expedition; much worse than reinstalling Windows. On second thought maybe I’ll put it off until tomorrow. A couple of good stiff bourbon-and-sodas seem to be calling a lot louder than Bobby-from-Bhopal just at the moment.
bring it on
The air conditioner is on. Does that suck or what? It was on last night, and several nights before that, and obviously several days as well. We have been in the grip of a humid, mosquito-ridden southern air mass. But not for long now. The wind is blowing. There’s a Canadian front on its way.
Bring it on! I say that, knowing that I’m buffered by the whole southern US and Mexico. But bring it on! I’m prepared for a blizzard. I’ve got a giant turkey in the fridge. I’ve got cornbread and cranberry sauce cooking, and T. has the bread machine fired up. I’ve got a clean floor and no more eau-de-dog, and just to smell my own kitchen leaves me drooling.
My computer is still fubar for work and I’m limping along there, but my gluten-free pie crust is a raving success. I bought a new tablecloth and tonight I’ll unpack the china that I had to box up before the floor guys came to move my furniture around. Yes, okay, I have china in a pattern I picked when I was 21 and would never pick now, but there it is. People I love have given me the best part of my collection, and I use it two or three times a year, and tomorrow is one of those times.
So happy Thanksgiving to all! I will be putting another log on the fire, and basting the turkey, and I’ll turn on a football game just to have the flow-and-glow that says Thanksgiving to me in deep-rooted family memory. This holiday is all mine, here. T. is happy to go along and even insisted on the giant turkey this year when I would have scaled it down…but I’m glad he did. My son will be here, along with happy dogs and cats and chickens. I’m thankful for every one. And I miss you all, you who know who you are, and wish for you always abundance and gratitude in equal proportion.
floor accompli
We have floor! Bob came back on Friday with extra helpers and worked them hard through Saturday. He finished up today by himself. Despite being ready to bite his head off last Thursday, I am happier with this job than any of the other few I’ve contracted out. (There’s always something.)
I’m getting off on picking up dirt now…there’s a remarkable amount that comes in, and it used to subside into the carpet, and now I can easily trap and remove it. This will last, oh, about another 13 hours and then I’ll be bored with cleaning. At any rate, the house smells better and looks bigger and, except for the click-click-click of doggy toenails, the acoustics haven’t changed much; I did spring for the expensive muffler underlayment and I think it was a good decision.
The pets are severely but probably temporarily skeeved: Mojo because he distrusts the impervious surface, Satu because she can slide completely across the living room while playing freakout around corners, and Milo just on general and comprehensive principle…Kati is the only one seemingly unconcerned. Sometimes it’s good to be fat and small and unimaginative.
Onward to Thanksgiving. I tried a gluten-free bread recipe for practice, so now we have a new kitchen concept: chicken bread. It was either feed it to the chickens or use it as the cornerstone for a new brick storage structure out back. The chickens are happy. Perhaps it would behoove me to try out the g/f pie crust before the big day, too…I refuse to bake pumpkin pie for the birds.
contracted anger
So yesterday the guys finally came, and Roberto and friend made a good start at our floor: 
and assured me they’d be back today at 8:30 a.m., and completely out of here by Saturday. Sure enough, this morning….nothing. Nobody showed. Nobody called. I left two phone messages that were not returned. I tried to sound not too much of a pushover; I was patient on Monday and Tuesday when they had a prior job to finish, but I am not patient now. I am envisioning our dining room still piled with furniture some time next week, like maybe Thursday:
complete with spooky cats, and not the right holiday for them either.
The Trouble with Contractors…does everybody have this? The trouble is, they hold all the cards. They know you’ll welcome them in when they get around to seeing you, and if in the meantime a job for a friend comes up, what’s to motivate them to do yours?
I hired Roberto because I’ve had this Trouble before, and he sat in my living room and said to me, “if I say the job will take four days, then I’ll be here Monday through Thursday and get it done, and then I’ll be out of here.” And he lied, apparently, because he did say the job would take four days, and I don’t think he can have it done by Saturday, although I suppose there’s an off chance, IF he is here at 8:30 tomorrow.
I’m kind of betting he will be, actually, with a big smile and no apology, but we’ll see.
So next time I will be smart. Next time I will take that optimistic estimate of finish date, and after we’ve negotiated a price for labor, offer a 15% bonus if it is actually finished by then. I’m not going to do that for Roberto because I am majorly pissed that he didn’t even call today after I told him my work schedule was being affected by his. I am thinking, though, of offering to help him improve his internet presence, which sucks, and conversely smear him all over the San Marcos corner of cyberspace (which is very small) unless he shows up and gets the job done well before Thanksgiving.
Yes, me, with threats and power trips. I guess I’m getting old. I know I’m frustrated. I know diplomacy works better than force—unless it’s force without mercy, and I’m fond of mercy—and it’s likely that Roberto has some unconscious alpha-hombre stuff going on, but still, I’m writing the check. And I don’t like being lied to.
waiting for Pergot
Sorry, I couldn’t resist the title.
Actually I am waiting for Armstrong laminate, though that’s not the reason my blog has gone silent. I’ve been feuding with my computer and unwilling to sit down with it on friendly terms. That’s part of the reason. Somehow it has gone whacko in the way it activates windows, and since I work with four or five applications going all the time, my frustration level is running high. I thought I had it fixed yesterday, but not—just mostly worked around, until the going gets tough and the wimpy get screaming.
I’d like to say I’ve been doing really cool stuff and have been too busy for blogging. Playing Portal, for instance. You have played Portal by now, haven’t you? But it’s only a few hours long, although the song from the end has moved into my head perhaps permanently.
Or maybe running my dogs with my kickbike. But that’s been only one weekend, and we haven’t managed to get beyond the driveway, although it was a lot of fun. I’m at the mercy of the bigger dog and if he decides to swerve over to the side of the road, or the middle, or worse yet, stop, I’m going to crash and burn. So I’m not in great haste to move on. It does seem a very useful exercise for the smaller dog and it was a joy to watch him give up the nervous distraction and settle into the work of it…especially since he started out very scared of two-wheeled contraptions in general.
The real reason has been an attack of humility, I suppose. Everything I sat down to write came out flat and stupid and obviously not worthy of being posted out loud, naked in front of God and everybody. Fortunately this inconvenient humility never lasts long and rapidly gives way to the realization that I’m hardly holding a gun to your head, dear reader. And then the thousand things freely rear their heads, those thousand things I’m pondering in any one day, and one of them and then another starts to look so very interesting and I long to have something to say about them, and suddenly I do.
So I fool myself and re-inflate my ego for the thousandth time, for ten thousand times, whatever it takes. And nobody is holding a gun to your head; these are my thousand things, subject to change at any moment, with any whim.
Today, a magazine guy knocked and then rang at my door, the asshole. I was in a mood, too, because of the computer, because of the waiting for the floor contractor, because of the perfectly legible, beautifully handcrafted No Soliciting sign that hangs over the doorbell. I have seldom been as rude out loud, maybe never. But then after the guy left, I looked up the traveling sales crew industry and learned some things. Next time I’m going to try to talk to one of these guys. It looks like they’re being almost universally scammed and exploited.
And then there’s Thanksgiving suddenly on the horizon…my first gluten-free Thanksgiving. Not to mention Christmas. Holidays have posed certain challenges to my stability for the past 13 years, and here’s another wrinkle. But not much of one, as long as I collect my ambition ahead of time.
Saturday I’ll be in Austin working on pattern drafting…Sunday I’ll be interviewing another high school student for the admissions program at my alma mater. The 2007 income tax season approaches and it’s time for continuing education. I’ve got chapters to edit. I’ve got bunko night, I’ve got Christmas music to practice.
I dunno what was wrong with me before, that I hadn’t a thing to talk about. Reading through it all, that might be a different matter, and you have my sympathies—but the thousand things are back, and that’s what matters to me.
