Tech Crap

It's been a day of fixing technology on the fly.

Chewie started it by biting partially through the power adapter for my laptop.  Unlike the other electronics and cords he's destroyed, this one had current running through it.  Aww.  How sad I am!  He yelped and ran away, looking at me with those big sad eyes.  I just said, "GOOD.  Now maybe you'll leave my stuff alone."  He only got shocked, not hurt.  I have no real hope that he will really learn from this.  I've already had to throw out a sync cable for my iPhone, a non-plugged-extension cord, TWO USB connection cables for my wireless music system, and he has torn up countless non-electronics things.  He doesn't get a lot of sympathy from me.  I got the damage mended.  Black electrical tape is a wonder.

My parents called next.  I bought them a Roku for Christmas, and they'd gotten it connected as far as plugging it in and getting the RCA cables attached.  Past that, they needed me.  I went up, fought with their wireless router which had never been set up for things to connect to it since nothing they have is wireless, added their Amazon account to the Roku and reactivated a defunct Netflix account and generally got the thing up and running for them.

I tried to use their computer at first, but something was using all the memory on it.  I took a few minutes to take care of that problem, cleaned off some old programs they didn't use, purged their startup folder, and tried to help speed up their machine a little.   I couldn't find what was eating all that memory even though I looked, closed some programs through Task Manager.

I'd brought my little netbook up to take care of the Roku setup since I knew from previous experience it's easier to have a computer in front of the screen to put in codes and so forth when setting one up.  My netbook, though, has serious issues because the hard drive is almost completely full of music, etc., and the memory is insufficient.  It started acting up and then it just began to shut down.  I guess it ran its batteries out and didn't warn me.  I was so afraid it was just dead from some kind of hardware failure, but once I got it home and back on the charger, it did finally load again.

I've been wanting to upgrade my external portable hard drive for a long time since the one I have currently is almost full, and I take pictures all the time and need space to put those fairly large files.  I have a plan to make my old 500 GB external my iTunes library for my netbook and take the load off its internal HD.  Friday, the 2 TB external and some new memory for the netbook will arrive, and we'll see if I can figure out how to make all that happen.

I'm not much by way of tech support.  I am hoping that I don't have to do much more of it in the near future. I can only do the most basic of things.  With any luck, I will be able to get my netbook working like it should before I have to start travelling with it, though.  In its current state, it's a real pain.  Maybe I have enough geek in me to manage this, at least.