Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Progress Happens

Since my last post was five days ago you might have suspected something was up. On Saturday I went out and got a new HP computer after grappling with my old Dell for over a week trying to get a plug & play USB headphone to be recognized. And the more I tinkered with the old PC, the more sluggish it became, even as I was taking steps to improve performance and speed!



Since Saturday I have been sitting here loading software onto the HP, installing backups of data files, and configuring email accounts for Outlook, among many other things. This process is never easy. However, this was one of the worst I can remember!

Aside from the obvious things like your My Documents folder, photos, music and videos, there are some which are easy to forget like tax returns from prior years stored in the Turbo Tax folder as well as remembering to put links to websites on your desktop which you like to visit such as Google Earth and Google Maps.

And speaking of Google Earth, I spent quite a bit of time on the old PC saving little flags on places where I have lived in years past as well as where current friends live, etc. I'm glad I remembered to move the file over where those saved places are stored!

I got all my Quicken financial data backed up and restored on the new PC which is rather important to me considering I've logged all my financial transactions since way back in the mid-1990s! However, I did have to upgrade to Quicken 2010 because Quicken 2008 wasn't compatible with Windows 7. I guess I should consider myself lucky that I didn't have more software upgrades to do... that I know of.

Anyway, it has been an adventure straight out of hell and back. Blogging was the last priority.

Even today, I spent almost the entire day trying to configure my konagod email account to work in Outlook. A few months ago I moved my domain from one host over to Yahoo and it was a much better deal cost-wise. Unfortunately, it didn't come with POP email so I had to manage everything in a Yahoo email account. That had escalated way out of control since it's also where all the Facebook emails are delivered. You know the ones... someone you don't know has commented on such and such page where you left a comment.

Yesterday I decided it was worth a couple bucks a month to sign up for a business email for konagod which allows for one POP email setup so incoming emails can be routed to Outlook where I can better manage things. (If you want to reach me, it's my blog name at my blog name dot com.)

I've set these up many times. Sometimes it's easy; sometimes it's a hassle. But I've never had such a flurry of problems as this time around.



Finally got that taken care of and now I can start a new year with the ability to better manage my emails. I've set a rule to force any emails from Facebook into a Facebook folder so they don't clutter my Inbox and I can go delete them at my leisure.

I'm starting to feel like I'm about to get my life back. I've been so wrapped up in all this today I completely forgot this is the day my dad died back in 1983. If he was still around I'm certain he would have enjoyed hearing about my tech hell. After all, he gave me my first personal computer experience back around 1976 or 1977. Back on those days, you manually entered all software code yourself, or you connected the computer to a cassette player and plugged in a software cassette that made a fax-like noise as it spent 20 minutes loading software for some black & white simple Pac-Man program!

Even after all the hassles of the past week or two, I can't say I miss that early PC experience much at all!

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