Introduction

OK, well I've started a handful of blogs and haven't continued with any of them. Finally I thought of an idea. We'll see if I can keep this one going.

This is stuff that happens to me or somebody else, or something I've learned, or something I want to teach somebody else.

For instance, I love my computer. It's 7 years old (bought in 2001 by my son and his wife, who became prosperous and bought a better one so they gave me their old one. That's fine. It's good enough for me.) In the last two months I have reinstalled my system at least half-a-dozen times, which shows you how proficient I am. I can find my way around a PC. I used to say that about my Mac, but it got old and won't meet my needs any more and I couldn't afford a new one and besides, I didn't like what I had learned about OSX so when the free PC popped up, I jumped at it. I figured it couldn't be too much different from the Mac. For the most part, I was right.

The nice thing about a PC is that you can burn your own CDs. And there are all kinds of CDs to burn: CD-R, which is a permanent effort, you can't erase bad moves and put in something better; CD-RW, which is erasable but won't work in certain situations; and there's even a 3 1/2" floppy, which is obsolete in most cases.

Just a few weeks ago, my CD started giving me trouble. This is about the beginning of my reinstallation of the systems. The ROS, as I'm going to call them, in the fashion of today's acronyms, call for backing up your data but to keep email you have to have to find out where to put the icons that represent folders in your email program. I couldn't do that. (For instance, I had several folders for email I wished to keep for later purposes; in the case of one of the ROS, I couldn't do that. In later ROS, I didn't think about saving them so they're gone forever.

Now, to the purpose of this blog: one of my disk drives had developed the annoying habit of not closing or opening in response to the little button that is supposed to make that happen. Then my son sent me a passel of grandbaby pictures (My first one!!!! I can't get enough pictures) and I couldn't read them off the disk. I tried everything. I finally decided to take it to CVS for printing and their machine could read it just fine. The prints were beautiful!

Then began my trek of trying to fix disk drives. I tried every trick I could think of. I asked a friend and he gave me a routine. It didn't work. Then I Googles the situation and found a users' group to see if there was a situation listed. There was, and I tried it. It involved un-installing the drivers for the disk drives so I did that, the PC reinstalled them for me. But nothing different happened. Except...the disk drive began working properly again!

Ain't that a hoot? That's the way most things happen. The late columnist Syndey Harris (whom I admired extensively) used to have something he called "Things I Learned on the Way to Look Up Something Else," so I guess that would fit this situation: something I learned while looking up something else. From that came an axiom: never discard any knowledge...there might be a nugget of wisdom in there.