Today started like any other. We started quietly. I did a remote view reading for a friend I have known for 20 years. We have a most remarkable freezer that oozes water from the top surface which is a great mystery to me because I thought water would flow along or down so I reckon there must be a lake of water under the top surface under some degree of pressure. Anyway we have decided to empty the whole freezer and let it sit around and heal itself, put the food back in due course and then see what happens.
In connection with that I wanted to look at the Hotpoint, the manufacturer of the freezer, so looked at their website and in order to download the instruction manual it was necessary to download a program which I discovered was called Fast!, some sort of management software. I realize I had been conned about the download and deleted it and that was when my troubles began.
I noticed that programs would not load on my computer and that the mouse jerked from place to place as if it had lost contact with what it was supposed to be doing. To my ever devoted and supportive friend Terry who gives me the technical support I need. He has the attitude of a ferret and will always find an answer if there is one. I tried all the standard methods like rebooting, starting in safe mode, rebooting again, hard booting to no effect. Knowing there is someone there in times of need is comforting.
After much colourful language and pacing around, I found a way in to system restore which has been a real blessing or more than one occasion. You have to have the patience of a saint because first of all you need to select a restore pointing time which to Windows 10 credit it shows very strategically which was 8.25 this morning and after recognizing and accepting the fact that the restore program could not be stopped off it went. It took 40 minutes to run and at the end of that time I realized that things were indeed back to normal.
The lesson I have learned is that you can never trust that a piece of software introduced either innocently or due to incompetence to marry with all aspects of your computer. Testing takes a long time as we should have learned by now in the world of covid and I guess some manufacturers don’t want to spend all that money making sure that the software works with all systems.
To be fair to Android their Play Store checks all the thousands of apps before they are allowed on to make sure there is no damage. I’m very lucky to have escaped damage so likely. I must remember to back up my system. Having said that I can’t find many friendly backup agents. It can take forever to have your computer data copied to the cloud. On previous occasions come up when I have looked at the file names of the backup files and folders and programs I do not recognise them and thus do not know how to download them again
The other drama that we had to deal with today was that Francoise had her co-operative bank card frozen because she put the wrong PIN number in. I don’t know how many of you bank with the Co-op but you need to be prepared for a long wait because ‘we are exceptionally busy today’ or some other reason.
The first time she waited about 30 minutes and then got through to someone who was actually quite helpful. However on the way to that she was asked to put in the eight digit number of account and the system did not recognize it. Nearly at the end of her conversation, the very nice lady could not hear the voice from our end so they said they would call back which they did but for some strange reason our phone did not ring.
We had to start the whole thing again and waited 40 minutes this time but when she did get through the whole matter was dealt with very quickly and in less than five minutes her card was unblocked. Obviously a system notepad being made but the call had to be terminated but she did not have to answer any questions again.
I can rather cynically say that the system was good because it had to be in order to deal with the sheer volume of calls.
Anyway the matter was expedited so I decided just celebrate by having a warm scone with jam and cream and a nice cup of tea.
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