Category: Computer Woes

Categories Blog Computer Woes Fan Works & Other Downloads LOST TV & Movies Wallpapers

New Wallpapers – 20 Years Since LOST Premiere

After the latest upgrade, Photoshop kept throwing up an exception error 😔 It seemed to load okay, but when I tried to create a new file or open an existing image, the error notice appeared and the program shut-down itself automatically. Eventually I rolled back to the previous version and Photoshop is working again! I didn’t look further what could have caused it; my laptop still matches the required specs okay even though Photoshop doesn’t work as smoothly as it used to. At least I got a working version for now!

The other day I realized that it’s going to be 20 years in September since LOST premiered 😲 I refuse to believe it! Wasn’t it only a year ago or so?? I still love it as much as I did when it aired. Evangeline Lilly (Kate) was one of my favorite people the wallpaper in those days, so I’ve made new Evangeline wallies to commemorate the 20 years. I’ve used these photos before too, they’re from a favorite photoshoot of mine.

I really like how these turned out! I haven’t had much of a creative juice the last 12 months and a couple of times when I tried to make a new wallpaper, it felt forced and I hated everything I came up with so scrapped them. I had some problems today too working on the first one (the bottom one), but when I tried that purple/green texture it all suddenly fell into place and the other three came without problems 💖

Technology Stuff
Categories Blog Computer Woes

Technology Stuff

Yesterday was a hard but fun day! Mom called me around 10am that could we go buy her a new smart phone and also a new printer ASAP preferably right away? We’d been more than low key planning to buy her a new cell phone sooner than later and had been researching models for a week or so. She had a Doro 8040 (her first smart phone) that had started to drop calls in the middle of talking and turning off randomly. It had happened again in the morning and she was suddenly just completely fed up and wanted a new smart phone right now! She’d also been talking about how their printer demanded to have its print headers checked every time now that she’d use it and she was totally fed up with that too! The printer was about 8-10 years old. She was worried that now that the nurses treating her SO call her many times a week (they call her because he doesn’t hear properly), someday her phone would just give up the ghost unplanned.

So, off we went! We ended up needing to only go the department store where usually do their shopping because they had the Samsung Galaxy A54 5G in black and that was the model we had been thinking is probably the one and she was fine with the color being black. The department store also happened to have one Canon home office printer left on sale and I have a Canon home office printer which has been great and still goes on strong about 10 years later, so we picked that one up too! We had prepared we’d need to go to few different stores to get both things so Mom was really happy she got them both from their closest department store where they usually go to!

Then we spent the rest of the day setting the printer up with their laptop and making sure it worked with both her and her SO’s Windows accounts and banks, and switching from the old Doro to new Samsung Galaxy. Some phone things went automatically such as phone numbers and wifi info, but I had to install her apps manually and port all the WhatsApp content manually. She had trouble doing the fingerprint scanning yesterday, it failed many times, but today in the morning she WhatsApped me that she put both her thumb and forefingers in without any trouble today! Mom was a little hesitant yesterday, after using the Doro smart phone for years (designed for old people), how she’ll learn to use the Samsung. But she didn’t want another Doro, wanted to try another Android phone, and today she said that she hasn’t had any trouble using it today and it’s quite similar to Doro after all! We also ordered her a pretty cover for the Samsung from https://www.mobiilitukku.fi where I got my own pretty cover for my Huawei.

There are still some things left to do on the Samsung such as bring over the photos from the old phone if she wants them, but all the things she needs everyday are setup and the rest can wait until go over the next time. Samsung Galaxy A54 5G seems like a great little phone, but there is one bad thing: there is no charger! Only the USB cord that can be used to charge from the laptop – which needs to be on for the phone to charge. So we have to maybe buy a charger which is sold as an accessory, but she’s going to try her Doro’s charger first. In the meanwhile, she can only charge the phone if there’s a computer with USB-C on location and obviously she’s not going to take her laptop if they go on a say a 20-hour cruise. I think not including a charger is really bad design!

In other news, we’ve been planning that Mom will buy me a new laptop for my 50th birthday gift in November. Well, looks very much like it’ll happen much sooner – maybe ASAP! My laptop’s hard drive has started to make a whirring sound when the laptop is turned on. The hard drive is an SSD one that’s only about 3 years old, while the laptop itself is 9 years old so I’m pretty sure it’s the laptop hardware that’s failing – considering that the other hard drive bay failed a few weeks ago already – and not the SSD hard drive itself. We agreed on the price range and am now seriously looking at models and specs to choose a new laptop, with the thought to buy it ASAP and also to just jump on it if there’s a good sale or a campaign on laptops in my usual computer shops. I’ll probably make the decision within a week or two, unless this laptop goes kaput suddenly.

I’m excited that my Mom has a new smart phone and that I’m going to get a new laptop probably soon and a little worried that this old trusty laptop dies without further warning. Up until now my programs have worked great, but today Photoshop was a little less smooth than before while opening menus and such. So fingers crossed this laptop will live until the new one is here!

(If I disappear for a bit it’ll maybe be because my laptop died suddenly and waiting for the new one to arrive in the mail. I haven’t set up my smart phone with login info for here because I can’t stand to use blogs with a tiny screen, but I’ll be back as soon as I can!)

Update: Hard Drive May Be Dying
Categories Blog Computer Woes Information

Update: Hard Drive May Be Dying

Turned out it isn’t the hard drive which is dying – it’s the internal second drive bay! I switched another hard drive into the bay, and that started to have the same problems immediately and that’s how I knew plus a few times Disk Management couldn’t even see the hard drive, and sometimes when it did, it couldn’t initialize it.

Luckily I have have two hard drive bays in my laptop and the Windows OS + programs hard drive bay and hard drive itself are working normally, it’s just the other one with the additional (my main) hard drive bay that is malfunctioning. Now that I’ve removed the hard drive from that bay my laptop seems to be back to its normal self. But my laptop is 10 years old this year, and we had been planning with my Mom for her to buy me a new laptop as my 50th birthday present towards the end of the year anyway, so it’s really good that was already in the plans! And it’s really good there’s no terrible hurry *knock on wood* but it’ll behoove us to grab a new laptop sooner rather than later if there’s a nice sale suddenly or something!

I hooked up that removed main internal hard drive with all my stuff to my USB station, and run checks on it and it’s perfect, no problems or errors at all!

Now that my laptop only has the SSD hard drive which doesn’t have nearly enough space for all my stuff, I’m going to have to keep my main hard drive hooked up via USB hub until the new laptop. Which requires an external power source and a table or a stool to place it on close to my laptop and couch, and cords running around, it’s going to be more inconvenient to get to my files but I’m just glad I didn’t lose anything ✨✨

Categories Blog Computer Woes

Hard Drive May Be Dying

Yesterday my main hard drive started acting up, my laptop stuttering and freezing. sfc says everything’s OK but chkdsk keeps stopping with an error in Stage 3 I think it was. My laptop has two hard drives – the SSD one (which I upgraded maybe 4 years ago) with the operating system and all my programs and as far as I can tell is working great, but this other one, now troublesome, is the one with all my stuff on it and it’s old, so it may just be dying.

Categories Blog Computer Woes Personal

More Computer Woes (But Not Mine!)

Picture from Pixabay

So we ended up emergency going out and buying a new laptop for my Mom and her SO. She called me yesterday evening that their laptop was throwing up an errors, and eventually it wouldn’t boot at all. She managed to take a photo of the error one time, and googling lead me to the conclusion that – considering the laptop was going on 14 years old – its hard drive was dying. We’d already been talking about buying a new one for a couple of years because it was so slow and probably wouldn’t even be ab, and Mom said she didn’t like to use it because of that anymore, and that she’d like to be able to watch Yle Areena video web service (it’s all jerky and stopping entirely after a bit on the old laptop) on the computer because they don’t have a smart tv yet (she wants one of those too now). But her SO wasn’t keen on a new laptop because they use it so little. But hard drive dying  solved the problem, and now they have a shiny new Acer Aspire 5 that has Windows 10 on it and is Windows 11 ready and can run Yle Areena without any problems. Their old laptop had Linux Mint on it, and Mom wants it on the new one too (Windows gets on her nerves while Linux is smooth sailing once its all setup), but it took all the time and energy we had today just to make the Windows ready for them so we happily left Linux Mint for the next time.

It was a good thing I’d already talked to them about needing a new laptop sooner rather than later, so Mom had been looking at them somewhat already and they were both mentally prepared for the idea already. I do all the installing and help a lot with the choosing when it comes to phones, televisions and computers for my Mom so I spent this afternoon installing Windows and getting it how we like it. I have to say that I love how fast the initial install is now – just only about 20-30 minutes and I can start setting all the custom programs up. What I don’t love is the need for the Microsoft account but I guess I can live with it, although my Mom hated it – luckily I remembered she has Skype so we were able to use that. The new laptop is an Acer Aspire 5 and 15”, their old one was 17,3” so it’ll take some getting used to having a smaller one. 

Now we only need to get my Mom a new phone – she dropped her Doro smartphone a few months ago and it’s never been right after that. Keeps turning off, or heating up. At first we thought we’d pick up Doro 8080 at the same time as the laptop, but then she decided that it’s too much mentally to get both a new laptop and a phone the same day, and also that she’d like to get it from the regular department store instead of a specialty store like the laptop. So we didn’t get one today, but I expect it’ll happen during August. She really into Doro, and want the fingerprint reader like I have in my Huawei, so Doro 8080 looks like it’ll be the next.

The heat wave is over for now 😀 and it rained a lot today 🙂 It’s so humid though my head didn’t like it, and it was made worse with the sudden need to go computer shopping and then getting it all in working order made my heart hurt worse because of the stress. Not sure if it’s gonna be a migraine attack, could go either way.