Luddite sadness

[flemmings]

Had a trojan on my XP. Took it to my sister's wizard in the far reaches of Downsville. Wizard did what wizards do, alas, which is reinstall the OS from scratch. This loses you things like email messages. That annoys me. If Windows can remember Documents and IE favourites, why can't it remember OE email folders, or at the very least, addresses?

The genius I used to have made house calls. He installed this Win98 many years ago (though not *that* many years ago-- well after 1998, for sure) and transferred all my email files from Win95. Hence I got the notion that when your tech guy says 'I'll transfer your files' he meant 'including email and addresses.' Wish he was still around. Luckily when I got the XP two years ago I had the wit to back up my email and addresses just in case, and so was able to transfer them. Those files were still there, in Documents where I'd saved them, so I do have my important emails back. I'm missing everything from Feb '09 to December '10, but memory insists gloomily that that wasn't much.

And the other thing that annoys me is XP needing language support to be installed from disk. I'd forgotten that detail when the bro took me out to Downsview and neglected to tell the wizard to add Japanese and Chinese support. Those of us in the 2nd hand refurbished market don't do disks so somehow I must rustle up an XP CD. And find where on earth I put my Word installation disks, that were tidily in a drawer last fall and now aren't. But then I hate writing on that machine and that monitor, and anyway I only have one monitor because the one the wizard said was just fine is only fine when it wants to be, and right now isn't, and so I'm back on Win98 which at least lets me play Yukon Solitaire in peace, even if it trips on Youtube entries.

Having had other things to worry about this last fortnight, techy dissatisfaction is almost nostalgic. But it's also depressing; if I'm going to b unhappy, there should be more constructive things to be unhappy about than the perpetual oughties plaint of 'I don't like how my computer screen looks.'

Comments

[nekonexus.livejournal.com]

I have an XP CD (possibly two, one in each flavour (Home and Pro)) should you not be able to otherwise procure one.

Boo on your wizard for not asking if you wanted email backed up. (Granted, .pst files are a PITA to locate and usually huge, but that's no excuse really.)

[incandescens]

I feel your pain on virus/computer breakdown -> loss of emails/web addresses/etc.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I think it was one of those generic 'Your computer is infected!!' ones, because that's the one I was trying to remove when something took over the whole system and made it impossible to boot even in Safe Mode. So possibly he didn't have the option. But I think Shay is right-- the guy before him didn't say anything about emails either, and probably because they're a pain to find.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

My fuzzy notion that XP guy did gave me disks, which I thought was an hallucination, turns out to be true. Found them while looking for the still missing Word disks and/or the case with the password. Haven't looked to see if the language support is on them, but if not will take you up on your offer.

.pst files are hard to locate? But I must have found mine on Win98 in order to have them backed up. Mind, it's easier to find anything in 98. XP wants to index chronically, and if you turn indexing off, claims it can't find anything ever. I really really don't want to go back to it, but dislike everything I hear about Win7.

Mac time, yes, I know.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

This has happened to you as well? But Windows does save Favorites at least?

[incandescens]

When my hard drive broke down last year, the helpful computer guy did manage to save all my writing (kept in a couple of specific directories, but I ended up with a complete reinstall otherwise.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Ow. What OS, and what caused the breakdown?

[incandescens]

Well, I did have Windows XP at the time, but given that I was having to get a new hard drive and power source, the helpful computer guy threw in an upgrade to Windows 7. Which has been working well so far.

(As I remember it, the power unit went, and took the hard drive with it. Bah.)

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Mh. So Windows 7 is OK? But what Word program does it use? That awful one that came with Vista?

[nekonexus.livejournal.com]

Yay for finding some disks at least.

I think the only MS Office suite I have at the moment is 2010, which is really cranky about licensing. It is the one *after* the one that came with Vista (2007), and an actual improvement over the absolute morass that that was.

.pst files tend to bury themselves way down in a outhouse system folder, unless you intentionally back them up elsewhere. Such is my fuzzy memory anyway, but it's been ... a good five years or more since I had to worry about them in contexts other than work (which has auto-archiving etc).

As for Win7, I actually like it. It is miles and miles better than Vista, and runs much faster and stabler than even XP for the most part. This depends largely on the hardware you're running it on, of course. I would not try to patch it onto an old machine.

Alas Macs. :-/ My dead-screen mac is STILL sitting on my desk. I need to deal with that.

[incandescens]

Windows 7 in general seems to be quite functional, but I am stuck with Microsoft Office Word 2007, which I suspect may be what you have/had with Vista.

I did prefer the old Word.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Does Win7 at least avoid that chronic archiving thing?

I may have to go to a new desktop, or possibly laptop, just because. But new hardware invariably involves screens that want to have hugely high resolutions. If I could run Win7 at 800x600, I'd buy it in a moment. (Not having $4000 for a laptop like my s-i-l's that allows you to enlarge and decrease with a scroll of a button. And am still not convinced that works anyway.)

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

My bro has it. It looked horrible on his laptop; even Open Office is better.

[incandescens]

It's tolerable now I've got used to it, but then I don't really do much with it other than basic writing.

[nekonexus.livejournal.com]

I'm not entirely sure I know what you mean about the archiving. Can you expand?

To a certain extent, the enlarge/decrease functionality is built in to Win7. It has an entirely different way of rendering fonts than previous windows, which means it can re-scale them much more easily. My laptop cost less than a grand, bought off the shelf at Staples, and with the built-in touchpad, I can do the two finger slide-away from each other to increase size, and slide toward to decrease again. (I think this also works with a scroll-wheel mouse, but I use a trackball, so I forget.) It's the same basic "gesture based" navigation that's available on iPhones these days.

Laptop has a 17" widescreen monitor that prefers to run at 1338 x 768 or something ridiculous like that -- but I can still turn the resolution down to 800x600 if I want to. It does not look horrible. (It actually looks better than low rez mode on XP, to my eye at least.)

... I was going to suggest going to a staples and poking at their shelf models for a while, but I don't know how locked down (software-config-wise) they make them these days). Alternatively, if the weather ever improves (and Crepe it Up returns from their renovation hiatus), we'd be happy to have you over, and show you Win7 on my laptop.

[nekonexus.livejournal.com]

Ah, sympathies. If you get the chance to upgrade to 2010, jump on it, because it fixes a lot of what went horribly wrong with 2007. (The File menu comes back!)

[incandescens]

So noted. Thanks!

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I think I'm thinking of Desktop Search, which made Windows crawl any time it was indexing. Turn it off, as all the webpages tell you to, and the search function says it can't find anything. Hated it with a passion.

I like that about fonts, which always looked crappy at any res in XP. I might go by a Staples some day and get them to demonstrate. Not sure I could manage a trackball again but that's a minor matter.

The weather will improve in about a month, going by the Weather Network, and when it does I'd love to see you guys again.

[nekonexus.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, windows indexing. I have never noticed it on win7, but then I do not use windows search. I do know what you mean because the indexing is turned on on my work computer (XP) and it kills me at times.

Strangely, this netbook XP doesn't seem to have it. Hm. Maybe I avoided that service pack/update thinger.

We shall look forward to it!

[nekonexus.livejournal.com]

Further thought, now that I am caffeinated: probably the reason I have never noticed the indexing thing on Win7 is that the search is now built in to your start menu.

You click on the bubble (which does not say start anymore, only gives you a window icon in a blue bubble) and there, right at the bottom of the menu, is the search box. You start typing, and it fetches results instantly - the start menu turns into a search result box.

(Also, we do have mice, of the USB kind.)

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

You click on the bubble (which does not say start anymore, only gives you a window icon in a blue bubble)

(moans) Why do they do this? There's been a start button on every iteration of Windows till 7. So they take it away. Because they can? Because they think different = good? I do not understand software developers. I suspect they're qualitatively different from us.

I like that kind of search, which is a good change. But if you haven't noticed Win7 slowing to a crawl when the system's indexing-- XP's huge failing-- then maybe they've managed to make it more discreet.

[nekonexus.livejournal.com]

Speaking from experience of working in a software shop, it's generally not the devs themselves: it's the project manager (PM) who dictates from on high, and then yells at the GUI designers when it doesn't fit their "vision". :-/ PMs are, I do agree, qualitatively different from "users".

I can honestly say I have never noticed anything actually slowing Win7 down, other than live-streaming the 2010 olympics in HD, and playing Habitarium in Neopets (Flash-game has memory leaks).

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Argh, that was the one I got on Wednesday was it - crazy virulent, a Javascript exploit via IE8 (which I only had to install because Chrome mysteriously started hanging the previous week, and Bell only installs IE6 for some odd reason) which I have no idea how one could possibly have avoided. Lots of ppl complaining in forums that McAfee won't detect it, but the actual fix seemed fairly straightforward; I couldn't get the laptop to boot in Safe Mode, assumed I had the wrong admin permissions, and took it to the CGI tinkerers who fixed it within 90 minutes, no loss of data whatsoever. And then I got off my ass and bought a Mac, like I'd been intending for a while.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

"And another one bites- and another one bites- and another one bites the dust." I *know* there's a Mac in my future but dammit I am just too old and non-techy to learn a whole new OS all by myself.

(You want nostalgia? I remember reading the glossy promo flyer when Mac first came out, mid-80s, and thinking mmm very interesting, well maybe I might, but really what would I use a computer for? My bro said 'You can store your recipes on it.' Yeah, and install it in the kitchen when I want to cook? That's why I have a recipe book I write in.)

I'm for anything that installs IE6, since the wizard put 7 on and I don't like it. The fix is easy enough the first few times-- I've removed several of those trojans myself-- but this was more virulent and obscure, if my googling of Hijack This scans was anything to go by, so I'd like to know what the CGI guys did to fix it. Am not at all reassured that McAffee doesn't detect it.