Cry'in Time in the City

I just hate it when I cannot solve a problem myself and have to depend on others. My student, Adam came over a couple of days ago and said the WiFi pen drive was not working and needed replacing. I am sure it was not a year old and would be under warranty still, but the invoice has been with the accountant for months. It is less aggravation to buy a new one than to track the accountant down. On Sunday, I went to one of the electronic stores and looked at laptops. Mine is over 5 years old and I was told that to upgrade it would be more than an new one. Since I love gadgets, no one had to twist my arm to get a new laptop. I did need to do more compartive shopping though and this required a Hungarian speaker. Bless Balazs, my TA offered to go with me on Tuesday after classes and my office hours. We went to two laptop stores and found much better configuations than the electronic store. I had specifications. I wanted 100 GB of hard disk space, 1 GB of Ram, a super video card, DVD/CD RW, at least 3 USB ports, and the list went on. We found my computer with a firewire for a digital video editor and it has a digital camera card reader built in. The brand was Tosiba, a name I knew and could trust. There were a couple of others, but they did not match up. The seller on this one was the screen. It has a super coated screen specifically for editing film either photos or video. I bought a new WiFi pen drive with a 5 year guarantee and a laser mouse. My cordless uses rechargeable batteries every other day and I have needed to reboot the computer to get it to work. Five years seems to be the limits of computer devices, so I will have to start budgeting again in four. On Wednesday, I told Balazs that I was going to buy the computer and he again offered to go with me; however, his father told him of yet another store where they were cheaper. We went there first. We were supposed to be able to get a good deal since Balazs' father knows the guy. Everything he showed us was at least $200.00 more and not as powerful. 80 GB HD or other goodies missing. We went back to the other store and I bought the laptop. Balazs came home with me and had a cup of tea and did not leave until 5:30, which was fine with me. I was too tired to play around with setting things up and saved it for today. When I got home today, I was haggard and had to take a nap. Then I loaded the CD software for the new pen drive. Then I realized I did not know how to configure the darn thing to read from my router. The pen drive is working, but the Internet is not. Okay, move on. I dimantle the thousand miles of wires in the back of the desktop to plug in the laser mouse. While down there, I did some dusting. It was like being a coalminer in grey fluffy coal and I worry about grey lung from the build up. Memo to self, vacuum more often down there. After loading the software for the mouse and rebooting, the mouse worked fine...but there are 10 button movements on the thing and not all of them are working. I seem to think it is still reading the software for the less educated mouse that lived here before, but if I uninstall the software and start from the beginning, my cordless keyboard will not work. Ugh! Then I put the battery in the new laptop and was told it had about 50% power left. I needed to let is run down completely before recharging it. I would not start at all, but I had to plug it in. The battery power was only 13%. It does have a built in WiFi card, but would not recognize my network and will not connect. I do not know how to configure this one either. I sent out an SOS and now am waiting patiently to be rescued once again. It is a tough lesson for someone independent to have to learn, but I must not have since it keeps coming to bite me in the butt.

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