Adventures in Computer Land

It's Friday morning and I sit here drinking my second (and last) cup of coffee for the day while I contemplate things I did yesterday and what I might do today.

Yesterday I tried to get a few of those TV programs watched, thought about visiting my sister who is recovering from a bout with pneumonia (but didn't go), considered dropping by the at&t cell phone place to change my cell phone number (but didn't go), took the wife to dinner (at her insistence), and spent a few hours at a friend's getting her computer back to normal and upgrading the memory.

I do that last as a favor. I sometimes get offered money for doing it but I always refuse. I don't do it for money, I don't really do it out of friendship. I do it because it is a challenge. And because I am a deeply sick person, I suspect. Consider the computer in this case... an aging Dell running XP and struggling with ¹/₂ Gig of memory and an almost full 40 Gig Hard Drive. If that doesn't tell you how old this Dell is, nothing will.

Before I left on my trip, I suggested she either get a new computer or buy more memory (as much as it could support) and I would install it for her. She did that... bought the memory, that is. Sent us an email about it arriving while we were on our trip. And then another email saying she had unfortunately deleted some important programs because she kept getting reminders about a lack of free disk space. Programs like Microsoft Word which she uses for things like spreadsheets and newsletters and such.

These things happen. She was in a bit of a tizzy thinking she had lost all the documents and spreadsheets she needed. But, of course, she hadn't. Uninstalling a program does not remove those things, just makes them inaccessible until you replace/re-install the programs that access them.

We found her Microsoft Office recovery disk and found it won't re-install the program when you have uninstalled it. I suspect there is another set of disks somewhere that will do this but she is unaware she has them. So I installed Open Office for her. I highly recommend this program suite from Open Source.ORG. It is free, reads and writes the same formats and documents as MS Office, is free, doesn't take up too much space, is free, and works well. Did I mention it is free?

She was very happy to learn she had not lost her data. So was I.

I then, somehow, managed to get rid of some programs that she didn't actually use anymore and old files that freed up about 16 Gig of Hard Drive space and, with the new memory, improved the performance immensely.

The only thing left is to get her a Calendar program. You see, she depended upon MS Outlook (part of that MS Office Suite) to maintain a calendar database and that seemed to be lost when she wiped out MS Office. I think I may have found a way to access the data through Open Office and I will try that.

All of the above... minus the stuff about TV programs, cellphones, dinner... is a lesson about about backing up data and not doing something when you are in a snit about your computer. It's best to get help from someone, almost anyone, when something seems to be wrong with it..