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[Nov. 2nd, 2009|09:01 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  frustrated | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Possibility, Lykke Li | ] |
Hooray hooray.
My enrolment for next year is currently screwed. A while back, they dropped one of the core subjects of my course, replacing it with a free elective.
Unfortunately, they've changed the administration system. The new system doesn't seem to know of the change. It's going "Oh. You need ITPS. I can't give you ITPS. Oh well!". I guess I'll have to go fight with uni bureaucracy again, I suppose, when I have time. ...Alternatively, I'll need to figure out where they've hidden the e-Request system in the new website. Of course, submitting an eRequest tends to require you know what you want to do, and I really don't.
In other topics of fail, Connor's got issues. Like, really bad issues. I turned on his screen this evening to be greeted by a parade of "This program has had an error and must be shut down." messages. I rebooted, he got to the desktop, and then crashed. Not just a blue screen of death, oh no. A corrupted blue screen of death. The text was all overlaying itself at random lines. He is now going through a boot-crash cycle every few minutes while I download a Live CD to try and save my data.
...My father claims it's a conspiracy. "Windows 7 came out last week, so this is Microsoft trying to convince you to upgrade." ...Hmm.
I was intending on spending this evening doing my data mining assignment, but I got a little distracted. Oops. I'll probably do a bit before I go to bed. I really can't do much more for Connor at the moment than make sure that there's a backup of everything. I have too many other worries on my plate right now.
The question also becomes refresh or replace. Connor's pretty decrepit, but I don't really use him that much any more. Chris thinks I should just stick with Mike, who also barely gets used, but Mike can't make use of a lot of Connor's hardware, like the surround speakers and the tape deck, and Mike has very few USB ports, to boot (even compared to Connor).
Why me?
-Mmaster
EDIT: To add to the list of complaints, trying to type on Bianca has been doing strange things to my wrists. It got to the point where I had to strap both wrists this afternoon. The fact that I only have one actual wrist brace meant the other was tied with a double-wrapped handkerchief. I went a bit overboard on the one with the actual brace, though - when I realised that my hand was turning blue, I decided it was probably time to loosen it a little. In some ways, the handkerchief's probably better, because it's hard to make it into a tourniquet one handed.
In possibly more promising news, I think it's just a software problem with Connor - he stayed up for a couple of hours running off the Puppy Linux live CD I made while I copied the essential data from the C:/ drive onto my secondary drive. (People talk about Ubuntu live CDs, but unless things have changed, they're terribly slow to boot compared to Puppy. Ubuntu probably makes a better permanent operating system (more packages, for starters), but Puppy is nice if you just want a quick alternative for whatever reason - if nothing else, the installer's a quarter of the size for a full GUI interface.) There were a few strange occurrences, - windows disappeared into the aether, and at one point the screen turned entirely black except for the semi-unresponsive taskbar - but I have a feeling those were more from Linux being glitchy than the hardware failing in some fundamental fashion.
The "Possibly more promising" stems from the fact that the prospect of re-constructing Connor fills me with little-to-no enthusiasm. I've uninstalled the apps that I could stand to lose and he's still unstable, which means it's a program I actually want. A fresh install of Windows takes me days. (Though hopefully it would be less so, this time, because the media files can stay on their current drive.) |
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[Feb. 12th, 2009|08:39 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  irritated | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Beat Of Your Drum, 78 Saab | ] |
Is it just me, or does FireFox 3 crash exponentially more often than FireFox 2? It seems to crash at least daily for me, often a couple of times. I don't remember FireFox 2 ever crashing.
...Maybe it's the rose-tinted lenses speaking, though.
I installed it because it was supposed to be more stable, or something. I'm unconvinced.
-Mmaster |
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[Oct. 26th, 2008|07:08 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | irritated | ] |
| [ | music |
| | You're Beautiful, James Blunt | ] |
Our Internets are being retarded. Slow as hell, with regular timeouts on most sites.
I'm not sure where the problem lies. My bet is on the terribly, terribly dodgy router. Half the time, typing in its IP address returns a "Server cannot be found" error. Yays.
...Of course, it's also possible that we've gone over the cap or something, but no-one can remember when the downloads flip, which makes this harder to determine.
We don't have a spare modem floating about to test with, unfortunately.
Sigh...
-Mmaster
EDIT: ...Even dialup is not made of this much fail and lose. For srs. |
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[Jun. 8th, 2008|09:28 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | frustrated | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Age Of Reason, John Farnham | ] |
Today, before heading over to Avalon to visit my grandmother, I took a quick shopping trip to Capitol Square to pick up some bits and pieces for my assorted computers. Two XP SP2 CDs, one for Bianca and one for my next desktop whenever I get around to that. And a new hard disk and floppy drive for Connor, because his hard disk's nearly full and he refuses to read from his floppy drive.
Several hours with a screwdriver later, I'm still exactly where I started. Windows flat-out refuses to acknowledge the SATA drive. This is doubly irritating, because the BIOS notices it. And, freakishly, I'm fairly sure that the first time I plugged it in, I got a "Windows has detected new hardware" bubble for it - but it never appeared in My Computer after that. Gah.
The floppy drive, meanwhile, despite having pretty green lights, says "Please insert a disk into drive A:" even when known-good disks are inserted. I don't remember any read sounds at all, so I think it's continuing its belief in the PHANTOM FLOPPY DRIVE (dun Dun DUNNN!).
I had a temporary, but very real, fear that Connor was going to end up in this situation:
After I'd declared myself defeated and resolved to shut it up and take him to Brinton tomorrow, he stopped booting, except for expressive beeps. A couple of times, I didn't even get that. After some pulling and prodding, however (I unplugged and replugged the RAM and video card), he booted again, and I breathed somewhat more easily.
*prods Connor* Why are you doing this, you idiot?!?
-Mmaster |
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[May. 11th, 2008|09:37 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  blah | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Hairspray's Run And Tell That: Kareoke - Haven't changed CDs | ] |
*Sigh*
Connor is irritating me again.
Floppy drive busted, replacement floppy drive also busted. Removing the floppy drive and then plugging in a USB one means that the USB one is still B: - it creates a phantom A: drive that is visible in My Computer, but doesn't correlate to any hardware.
I can't get the SATA hard drive I bought the other day to co-operate, either. I don't know whether I'm just not ramming it onto the connectors hard enough or something, but despite it vibrating like it's operational, the operating system doesn't notice it. This is the case whether it's plugged directly into the motherboard, or as an external hard drive in my enclosure.
Meanwhile, ProgSoc's fallen over. The webcam's still operational, but web and ssh are both failing. Woo.
In other news, Dad is sick to the point of throwing up - Mum just left to take him to the local medical centre. And we're supposed to be visiting family this afternoon.
Boy, this is shaping up to be a fun day...
-Mmaster |
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[Nov. 11th, 2007|06:42 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  calm | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Falls On Me, Fuel | ] |
Connor's hard drive is currently being copied onto my external hard drive, via the USB enclosure I bought today. The question is now whether I'll ever be able to get it slotted back in. And whether I remember which way around the assortment of cables go.
I also bought a cheap case fan to replace the previous case fan that wasn't working for some reason. This one has the additional joy of a slightly longer cable, that makes it easier to deal with. That brings him back up to four fans; one on the motherboard, one on the powerbox, and two on the case.
Once the copy finishes, I'll plug him all back together, and then I'll probably ask Dad to take him to the shop on Monday.
In other news, Chris and I watched three episodes of Spooks today. And will probably watch the rest, one episode a night, after work. I'd forgotten how awesome much of it is; I hadn't watched much outside of the first season in a long time.
-Mmaster |
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[Nov. 11th, 2007|01:00 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  sleepy | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Expo '86, Death Cab For Cutie | ] |
Chris visited, and we did a little troubleshooting on Connor.
* Removing the RAM makes him emit an expressive continuous beep. So, the inbuilt speaker is still working.
* Replacing it silences the beep. So it probably isn't fried RAM that's the problem.
* There's a little LED on the motherboard that's supposed to shift from "Flashing" to "On" if the machine successfully completes POST. It was still flashing when I wandered back five minutes or so later.
* Chris' best guess is a fried video card. Except we can't figure out how to pull it out to try booting without it; there's some form of locking mechanism on the seating that means the card won't come out easily. The manual doesn't tell you how to unlock it, just what type of card it takes.
At that point, I think it's probably a matter of taking it to the shop and saying "What the Hell have you done to my machine?!?" or words to that effect.
However, before I do that, I want to back up the contents of the hard drive, just in case. Unfortunately, I can't just plonk the drive into Mum's machine; it's an IDE drive, and to the best of my observational skills, her computer only seems to have SATA support. (I was amazed to discover that Connor supported SATA - I never knew that.) So, would anyone happen to have an IDE hard disk to USB case around anywhere, that I could borrow sometime in the next couple of days? ...I could always head to Capitol (and probably will, if all else fails), but fixing him's going to cost a reasonable amount already, so adding extra expenditure to the bill doesn't grab me very much. But ideally I'd like to have my computer back in one piece (not open on the floor), as soon as is feasibly possible - so it's something of a balancing act.
And now, it's quarter past one. I've decided to jig dog training, and arranged to meet up with Chris to watch the second season of Spooks - we watched the first one today. So, sleep is in order, I believe.
-Mmaster |
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[Nov. 8th, 2007|10:04 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | irritated | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Can't Believe My Eyes, The Lucksmiths | ] |
F**k.
Connor's suddenly started crashing on boot. You load him up, and eventually the mouse stops moving and the machine refuses to respond. I can't really give you any more detail than that.
The first time, the machine had been up for two to three hours. I rebooted, and when it happened again, tried again. It seemed to get earlier in the sequence each time; though not quite. After about the fourth boot I decided to stop in case I actually damaged something. It's now pretty much freezing as soon as you boot the machine. Generally just after the welcome screen; halfway through it, once.
Anyone got any obvious solutions to try, or is it "Move the disk to copy the data, then wipe and reinstall everything" time? *sigh*
-Mmaster |
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| *boot* *crash* *boot* *crash* |
[Oct. 31st, 2007|05:21 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | frustrated | ] |
I hate Microsoft Word so much right now.
Apparently thirty-page documents are beyond its capabilities.
...Gah!
-Mmaster
EDIT: The irony was even greater, since my boss didn't believe me when I told him that Word tends to flip out at random for no good reason: "I don't think that's likely, I've never seen it happen!" |
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[Oct. 27th, 2007|03:33 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | irritated | ] |
| [ | music |
| | She's Got My Number, Semisonic | ] |
I can't tell whether Microsoft Word, or Tristian, is the greater failure in this scenario.
( Read more... )
MS Word was using all of the CPU I'd let it have, yet only around 20,000K memory - and it wasn't doing anything.
Tristian needs more RAM, and I've acknowledged this before, but I don't think it was his fault this time. I could alt-tab to FireFox and stuff quite happily, it was just Word that threw a spaz. Sigh.
-Mmaster |
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| 'Course, I think Tristian might be due for a reinstall regardless... |
[Oct. 13th, 2007|10:06 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | frustrated | ] |
| [ | music |
| | A Match Made In Texas, Her Space Holiday | ] |
I'd never really twigged to how much faster Connor is than Tristian.
I mean, I knew that Connor had roughly twice the RAM. But the point was, I don't think I'd ever sat the two down next two each other and tried to perform the same task.
Well, admittedly, I didn't do precisely that this time, either. However, I came closer to doing so than previously.
I installed NetBeans to Tristian the other day. I don't think I'm lying when I say it took roughly an hour to finish the installation (I don't remember precisely). Running it on him is, I've decided, more or less a lost cause; if you happen to alt-tab away from the program, you're waiting five minutes or more for the screen elements to come back after you return.
Connor, however? Two minute installation, one minute program load, and relatively instantaneous responsiveness.
Now I just need to not get distracted by the Internet while trying to work. 7PM deadline with an undefined task. Fun fun fun.
-Mmaster |
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| Ah. My dear Etch-A-Sketch... |
[Sep. 14th, 2007|09:00 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | irritated | ] |
| [ | music |
| | The New, Interpol | ] |
Tristian's been collecting problems.
* Sound's always been erratic - often requiring a whack to actually make the connections and make sound come out. This is a problem with both the speakers and the headphone jack.
* His optical drive, despite being a DVD/CD-RW drive, is refusing to read DVDs.
* If you move him, he rattles - there's apparently something loose rattling around inside the case somewhere.
* Possibly related to the previous point, his screen hinges are worryingly loose, particularly the right-hand one.
* Probably the most annoying/worrying/distressing/whatever one, however, is the fact that he seems to have a loose connection at his power jack - you move him, and he converts to battery power until you wiggle the cable (sometimes pulling it out ramming it back in works better).
And oddly enough, I wouldn't think I've really abused the machine all that much. He's carried in a padded case (and, typically, a padded bag around that); I don't remember dropping him.
Unfortunately, I can't actually spare him for the week or more it would probably take to get him looked at and maybe fixed until after semester finishes. This means handling him with kid gloves for another two to two and a half months. ...Yay...
-Mmaster
PS: Microsoft's gone back to being retarded. Dude, what?
EDIT: For those of you who wanted to know, you can still run 7.5 under XP, if you trick it into thinking it's Win2K using the compatibility wizard. Though some people complain it breaks the program entirely...
EDIT (2):
* Could almost certainly do with some more RAM, but I don't know what kind; I think he's a Vaio VGN-B55G, which means that this looks like it would work
* Windows probably needs reinstalling |
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| DAMMIT! |
[Jul. 9th, 2007|07:28 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | annoyed | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Those Canaan Days, Joseph And The Technicolor Dreamcoat | ] |
...
Connor has just fried his power box. ...I think.
Whatever it is, he went "Pop" loudly, blew the power to that section of the house, emitted the smell of smoke, and now refuses to power up.
Yay...
(And Tristian's still rattling... ...Sigh...)
-Mmaster |
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| "You shook Sinatra's hand, and you should know better." |
[Jun. 26th, 2007|10:12 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | sleepy | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Stockholm, I Am Jack | ] |
Is "busy, if lazy day" a contradiction in terms?
Because that's how I would describe today.
* Late breakfast
* Bath & washed my hair
* Got a lift to Uni because my father was heading in
* Did a close-to-scale drawing of the ProgSoc shelves - along with listing what was in each section
* Read RSS feeds
* Went to lunch with Chris and Liz but didn't eat
* Edited a website
* Submitted the changes
* Acted upon observed errors in changes
* Went to the movies with Chris and saw Ocean's Thirteen
* Came home
* Acted upon a few more observed errors
So yes. I basically haven't stopped since I got started, but I also haven't particularly rushed anything. Nice.
Doing the shelf diagram was made more complicated by the fact that I didn't have a ruler on hand - eventually I constructed one, copying my tape measure onto a punchcard. ...I found we did, in fact, have one, after I'd finished the picture. Sigh.
...In other news, Tristian's rattling when you move him. This strikes me as a singularly bad sign. But there's nothing obvious to be done about it, so...
-Mmaster |
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| Misbehaving browsers and procrastination. (I didn't recognise you without the handcuffs.) |
[May. 30th, 2007|02:46 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  geeky | ] |
| [ | music |
| | The Tango: Maureen, Rent | ] |
Interesting.
Connor's been lagging a lot recently; if I could be bothered affording it, I'd buy him some more RAM. But I can't, so I guess he'll just have to keep chugging along.
Anyway, one thing I've discovered eats the power badly is running IE Tab. It isn't so much the fact it loads Internet Explorer inside FireFox (the memory usage is more or less comparable whether it's running the window inside a tab or as a separate IE window) - but the fact that it doesn't appear to release it correctly after the tab in question has been closed. I can't really say I'm surprised, but it's still annoying. *shrugs*
Elsewise, perhaps more surprising, I can't seem to find a FireFox extension to redirect the default folder for downloads depending on the location of the file to be saved (there's plenty that will redirect depending on file extension, but that's way away from what I want); and don't know JavaScript, so I can't write it myself. From the outside, it doesn't seem like that difficult of a task, but I candidly admit to having no idea what's involved.
* If the file being saved is from subdomain.domain1.com, default the "Save As..." dialogue box to Folder A - but make it changable
* Else if the file being saved is from domain1.com, default the "Save As..." dialogue box to Folder B - but make it changable
* Else if the file being saved is from domain2.com, default the "Save As..." dialogue box to Folder C - but make it changable
* Else default the "Save As..." dialogue box to dialogue to Folder D - but make it changable
*shrugs* It's not that I can't dig through the folder structure to find the relevant one, I'd just prefer to be lazy. :P.
And now to get dressed, and try to force my C code to work. Argh.
-Mmaster |
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| You rearranged my life - all I gotta say is "I must have done something right"... |
[May. 19th, 2007|07:32 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | geeky | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Must Have Done Something Right, Reliant K | ] |
Chris says: "I went to bed not long after that, but couldn't switch off. I lay there for a bit, then got up and dragged Trent and Bill into my room, and tested each"
Chris says: Progsoc is getting to you know i can tell..
Shoulder Angel says: *One eyebrow raised*
Chris says: it's ok, I have the same problem, waking up at night wanting to pull apart old machines and get them working, really ;)
Shoulder Angel says: Heh
Shoulder Angel says: Trent's probably going to be thrown out, actually
Shoulder Angel says: I was going to try and install something onto Bill to act as a file server, but he's so old that if I put a Puppy Live CD into him while booting, he spits it out again *eyeroll*
Chris says: umm Bootdisk for linux ? :p
Chris says: lol
Shoulder Angel says: Want to come over and play with half dead machines some time? :P
Shoulder Angel says: Trent has been pulled apart - I'm trying to decide if any of his stuff is useful for Bill
The project that came to me that caused me to drag out the machines in the first place was, as I said, to get Bill acting as some sort of file server. A sort of central point to access back ups and/or media files. Even when I first thought of it, there were a number of problems that sprung to mind immediately (and no obvious solution has been presented). The most important ties between the fact that
* I have no idea what I'm doing, and
* Bill is so old there's a lot he really can't deal with at all well.
However, it was more one of those "I have these machines sitting in the corner. Why are they still sitting in the corner?" feelings.
The way he's currently set up (Windows) would be ideal for the task (all of the other machines on the network are Windows, so it would merely be a case of sharing the entire hard drive and running with that), except for the partition restrictions - Yay 30GB per partition. There's also the fact that I only have a couple of spare hard drives; he came with a 4GB drive, but we added an extra 20GB later on. There's also Trent's 2GB drive.
Having put various pieces of Trent's hardware into Bill, I can say that:
* I'm fairly sure Trent's RAM is fried (which is probably why he is/was not booting); you put it into Bill, and Bill doesn't boot - take it out, and he does.
* Trent's hard disk is fine. Though it appears the Win95 install that's taking up half its space is corrupted.
* Bill can only handle two hard disks at a time. Or at least, with his current cabling. Oddly, the one you'd expect to be designated for a secondary CD drive is the one that you have to plug the second hard drive into; and I haven't found anything happy to exist on the one that you'd expect to be the secondary hard disk.
* I haven't been able to prove that Trent's CD-ROM and Floppy drives work or don't. Plugging the floppy drive in gives the literal result "Lights are on but nobody's home". The reading light stays on (green) while the power's running, but the OS doesn't detect the drive. The CD-ROM requires some extra cable that I haven't been too enthusiastic about pulling out of the working parts of Bill.
* Bill's CD-ROM drive motor is nearing the end of its life - eject the tray and it gets halfway then does its best to pull itself back in, except
* If you insert a Puppy Linux CD in during boot, he spits it back out and refuses to read it. I haven't got around to testing with any other discs as yet.
...Hey, it's better than fighting with C code. "Why am I using a pointer to a pointer to a pointer? ...Because it won't compile if I use any other combination, that's why!"
-Mmaster |
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| It's too early in the morning for my computers to be stuffing me over. *pout* |
[Mar. 11th, 2007|07:35 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | ...sigh... | ] |
| [ | music |
| | The Doctor And The DJ, Her Space Holiday | ] |
Gragh.
Technology around my house is having a bad week.
Mid-last week, Internet Explorer stopped responding to the keyboard. You'd open a page, try to type into a text box, and there would be no acknowledgement of your keystroke. This miraculously went away the following morning, meaning I didn't have to do a fresh install on both my machines. Yes, I primarily use FireFox. But I like to be able to use both; especially since it mean I can log into the same site with different accounts, and just flip between them.
At the same time as IE suddenly nosedived for no apparent reason, my hacked-to-Hell MSN Messenger also re-started telling me "Hey! There's a new version! It's shiny!" I somehow managed to get rid of those messages for at least several months; they are now back with a vengeance.
Last night, I plugged the 2Gig USB key that I received for Christmas in to Connor. Right click, create folder. Blue Screen of Death. Plug it in to Connor. Right click, create folder. Blue Screen of Death. Plug it in to Tristian. Right click, create folder. Blue Screen of Death. ...sigh...
This morning, I swapped some files between Connor and Tristian over the network. After I'd finished doing so, I hibernated Tristian, and then closed the window on Connor. I don't know if that's what confused it, or something else. Whatever it was, Connor's Windows Explorer appears to have spectacularly crashed, taking FireFox (which was running at the time) with it. After a reboot, FireFox has managed to lose my bookmarks and settings. It's still got the add-ons; but they've lost all customisations. It's forgotten my home pages; but still has everything in cache.
Whether to re-install... Or just to re-set up things...
-Mmaster |
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[Nov. 13th, 2006|06:55 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | calm | ] |
| [ | music |
| | It's Too Late, Evermore | ] |
Tristian's working very hard at suicide. Sigh. I'll have to take him to the Sony shop tomorrow and see what it will take to get him fixed. Vaguely more annoying is that despite my best attempts, when I was pulling him apart I lost one of the screws to CompSoc's floor. I found ten cents while looking for it, though.
Today's exam was scary, in that it was one of those ones that feels much easier than it should be - and it makes me afraid that there was some major trick in half the questions that I just didn't notice.
There was probably something else I wanted to write, but I'm sure it'll wait.
-Mmaster |
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[Sep. 19th, 2006|05:45 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | irritated | ] |
| [ | music |
| | The dog barking | ] |
Dammit, I broke Photoshop Elements. Every time I try and "Save for Web", it gives me an error message. *grumbles*
1. Restart program (Failed)
2. Restart machine (Failed)
3. Reinstall program (Worked, thank goodness) (Gave the illusion of working, then gave same error) (Apparently it just hates half the files; I can copy-paste the image and it saves. Sigh...)
4. Yell at machine (Failed, but made me feel better)
5. Reinstall program, ensuring that any relevant registry keys are deleted
6. Cry
7. Give Connor the reformat I've been threatening for a while
Let's hope it doesn't get to 7, eh?
-Mmaster |
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[Sep. 16th, 2006|03:34 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | angry | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Donner Party, Alkaline Trio | ] |
*growls irritably*
Things that are no longer working, since the most recent update to FireFox:
* Click-drag reordering of tabs
* Displaying images after clicking the "Show images" button, until the page is refreshed
* Copy-paste into textboxes
* Click-drag text into/around textboxes
Dammit! WORK, DAMN YOU! *Prods executible, annoyed*
In other news, today I accomplished several of the things that I was intending on doing yesterday (when I failed to move from in front of the computers all day): I paid in the handful of cheques, returned the shoes that came unstitched, went grocery shopping, and sorted the mail. I still have to take the dog for a walk, but regardless, it's a fairly accomplished day.
GRARGH! And the help pages are no use either!
-Mmaster
EDIT: The copy-paste thing appears to not have been FireFox's fault. My clipboard apparently spectacularly hated me, and a machine restart fixed the issue - along with most of the other issues. The "show images" thing is still messing up, but that's probably a "compatibility with extensions" problem rather than anything else. I think Connor's going to die quite impressively soon. Sigh. |
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