(Mis)adventures in Computing

When we left on our trip, everything was almost fine. Except that the first contact we had with Frannie revealed her monitor had "died." No big deal, it had lived a long and useful life. It was the last surviving part of a system we had received as a gift over 7 years ago. I had replaced the motherboard and case, as well as the keyboard, some years back. Frannie had replaced the printer less than a year ago. She didn't actually need a printer as there was a networked printer available but she wanted one.

In any event, I spent the better part of three hours Saturday straightening out her computer after connecting the new monitor I had ordered online. The monitor had arrived in a timely fashion (4 days) and, in spite of the normally harsh treatment by the combination of UPS and the USPS, was in perfect shape... including the carton it came in. All the parts were there, too. I am impressed by this for some odd reason.

The problems I had to straighten out did not involve the monitor... which installed just fine. No, it was AVG Free (version 2013) which caused me much heartburn and Internet Explorer. Normally, I find AVG Free to be a superior product but something about the latest version has irritated me. I had attempted to update to that version on Frannie's computer just before I left but it didn't take. This happened on my own machine and it took a bit of work to get it completely cleaned out and re-installed properly. With Frannie's machine, I had to locate, download, and run a utility to remove the failed installation. Once that was done, a new installation of the program went fine... with two exceptions.

Somehow, I added two other programs without realizing it. These were "junk" programs that piggyback on the installation of a program you want. So, they had to be uninstalled. Upon uninstalling these, the program takes you to their websites and asks you why you  uninstalled each. You do not want to know what I told them beyond expressing my displeasure with programs that piggyback on installations and suck up resources.

The other little problem was the misbehavior of Internet Explorer 10. It seems that, regardless of how you exit that  program, it pops up a little dialog box which says that "Internet Explorer has stopped working." Of course it did! I exited the program, it's supposed to stop working. So, I installed Firefox and (after much investigation on how to do it) and uninstalled Internet Explorer.

The little eMachine now runs smoothly (though it could use more memory) again. Until the next time.