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Discolor Online

Weblog of the sweetest person you never want to piss off.

 

Is my computer Fuxxored?

Ok, so technology hates me. We're all clear on that. PDAs, hard drives, laptops, printers, routers, light bulbs for pete sake, they all tend to fritz out (from going just a little wonky to outright self-immolation) when I'm around.

Right now my installation of Firefox is driving me insane. Keeps crashing, randomly, multiple times a day. Sometimes I can use it for hours, other times it just goes all to hell and crashes, crashes, crashes. Fine. Ok. I'll reinstall. Try that, no change.

Ok, so I'll completely uninstall it and try that, I think.

I'm on a PC, using XP. I know how to do this much, or so I think. Go to control panel, go to "Add or Remove Programs" and get the message "Currently installed programs: please wait while the list is being populated..." FOREVER. Seriously. It never lists the programs, ANY programs, that I have installed! I left it "populating" for half an hour and gave up.

I can't even begin to imagine what else is completely screwed up on my machine if I can't get basic control panel stuff to function. I swear, I'm not bad to my computers! I love my electronics, they just don't love me back. Any tech-heads out there have any ideas on where to start figuring out and fixing what's wrong?

Luckily I've got all my important crap backed up: bookmarks are backed up online, contacts are in my Palm and I've been using Plaxo, my e-mail is cc:'d to a gmail account that I keep specifically for backups, my important documents (like our Quickbooks files and contracts) are regularly backed up to a thumb drive and occasionally bulked to a CD. Although it's not unheard of for me to lose multiple electronic aids at once (like the Palm blowing up and the next day the hard drive blowing up, as happened to me last summer)...

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Anonymous Anonymous Says:

Does Kate use this machine? Randomly clicking around the web and accepting installs of strange activeX controls and such that come along with random cutesy pages is a good way to hork up the machine (and the results of this typically show up by first making your browser behave oddly).

If you run Vista, you should probably create separate log-ons and give Kate a log-on without "Admin" privileges (you don't need to give her a password or anything). That would stop her from accidentally screwing up the computer by clicking "Yes" to some strange website's request to install something odd on the machine.

That would also allow you to take advantage of XP's full range of parental controls, which might come in handy.

 
 
Anonymous Anonymous Says:

Sorry, I meant to say "if you run XP" in the post above, though same principal applies to Vista.

 

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