(no subject)

[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 jackiekjono to LJ! (Yes, that Jackie whose sole and direct fault it will be if I ever actually do that "Don't Worry, Be Happy" vid!)

Comments

[tracy-rowan.livejournal.com]

When you defrag in Windows (at least up through 98; I haven't noticed this in XP) you literally have to turn off everything that's running except the most basic stuff. Most of those little icons in your system tray should be turned off. It's a pain, but it's about the only way you can do it w/o restarting the process over and over. Best way to do it is to shut all that down last thing, and let the defrag run overnight. I once had a defrag session run 14 hours because of this very problem.

Your iBook, I can't help with, sorry. I confine my expertise to stupid PC tricks. *g*

[jackiekjono.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the welcome. So far I'm having a good time, though I do think my first entry is rather silly. Oh, well. Somebody has to get the word out about the poor, lonely, homeless Brits like Candy, my icon.

If you are looking for cheap software that doesn't bloat, is not buggy, and is totally cross-compatible with Microsoft Word, check this out.

www.thinkfree.com

It opens all of my word files and doesn't crash. I'm pretty enthusiastic about it.

[the-star-fish.livejournal.com]

Hey, babe. I had the same problem with MS Word about a year-n-a-half ago. (What OS are you running? I got stuck with ME when I bought the Dell.) I did all the stuff I should've, nothing worked. I've been running AbiWord, which gives me very little functionality - will have to try one of the others like openoffice.

And now I must away, to work. Bleah. Maybe Jerry Orbach'll check in again.

Defragging and Scandisk - Use Safe Mode

[(Anonymous)]

"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."

Incredibly annoying and yeah, it can add hours to the process. The problem is that Windows OS wants complete control of the hard drive when you use scandisk or defrag. Any other program that tries to use any system resources can and usually will cause restarts - especially a resident virus checker.

The easiest way to avoid the problem is to start the computer up in SAFE MODE, which only loads the bare essentials of the OS. Scandisk and Defrag will run in a fraction of the time, and you shouldn't have any restarts.

Using Task Manager to turn off the other programs works too, but I find that most people are confused by the abbreviated names and aren't sure what does what, and so leave on non-essentials, or turn off essential components.

Try SAFE MODE, it really does cut down on the time needed.

Karen

[laurakaye.livejournal.com]

I heart OpenOffice.