katallison

So yesterday was the day I came thisclose to hauling all the computers down to the Lake Street Bridge and dropping them in the Mississippi. The iBook *still* has the weird battery malfunction, *still* is refusing to recognize the Airport wireless card, *plus* it will no longer acknowledge the direct ethernet connection which was working just *fine* a week ago and I swear to GOD I haven't changed any settings since then.

And then the PC began acting like a possessed thing, locking and crashing and going into fugue states, so I defragged, which took *four freakin' hours* because every time it made a .05% increment in the defragging process the status line would say brightly, "drive content changed, restarting," and it'd go back to the beginning and start over.

Post-defrag I checked stuff out and the diagnosis is that things are basically OK except for MS Word, which is dead, dead, dead, or more accurately has become a deranged killer and takes the entire system down any time I try to open it. This is not a disaster, given my vast distaste for Word, but is damned annoying, and for a while I thought I'd try reinstalling it, except that would require finding the install disk, and could I possibly have put that anywhere where I could find it again? oh HELL no. (Although I was able to find not one, but two, installation disks for Windows 95. How very useful.)

I ended up downloading OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org) and am actually *very* pleased with it so far. It has a word processor offering almost every functionality that I use in Word (including Track Changes, for beta'ing), as well as a nice spreadsheet that can read Excel documents. I haven't put it through any stress tests yet, but so far it looks like an excellent alternative to MS software. Plus, open source and *free.*

So, we are back up and running here today.

Oh, and also I wanted to welcome that fine and funny vidder