When The Technology Fails

Or what happens when you turn on your Win 7 machine and right after the blue and white welcome screen, instead of getting your desktop you get a solid black screen with a cursor that doesn't do anything.

That just sucks.

Drag the box over to Geek Street and give it to them. Meantime I'm saved by having my old XP machine that I kept because it had some programs I use on it that wouldn't transfer. Runs a bit slow. Maybe I should runs some maintenance on it. Start with Malware Bytes, which informs me that the malware list is about 850 days out of date and would I like to update it. Hard to believe it's been that long, but sure.

55 pieces of junk down the drain later, the machine runs much better. Run CCleaner. 850 meg of further junk later the machine seems almost back to normal. Refresh Firefox? Probably shouldn't have done that but the inconvenience was minimal. It also seems that in the last 850 days I've updated a few passwords and of course have not kept the old box current.

Sat at 8AM I go out for breakfast with some other bloggers. 9:30 Geek St calls and leaves a message that my computer is ready. D'wife is sleeping in. 10:30 I get back and immediately take off to run errands. 1 PM I get back and D'wife has gotten up and informs me that GS called and my machine is ready. I check and sure enough, they close at noon on Saturday so no new machine until Monday.

The problem here is that I've been using the Lightning add-on to keep track of my schedule and without the new machine I find I barely know what day of the week it is, never mind where I'm supposed to be and what I'm supposed to be doing. Coming up is the IDPA match at DuMont with a rifle side match, an IDPA-style rifle only match out at Byers, a drone race at which I've been invited to bring the pedal air gun so as to let the spectators take pot shots at the racing drones with big Nerf darts, and a Weird Al concert. Last I heard, there were no actual conflicts.