March 22, 2004
-
Recovering My Computers
My current primary computer, formerly my backup, now works with one of the two printers (the all-in-one that includes a scanner) and my camera, so I can now process the photos that Delia asks me to make of the displays she prepares for her work. I had some Wild Animal Park photos on the same memory chip as the fragrance display photos, so I'll upload one of those instead, to demonstrate that it's working. I'm sure you'd rather see wildlife than a cluttered store display.
Well, that didn't work. Xanga didn't want to do the upload. It didn't matter which photo I picked. But that's probably a Xanga problem, not a problem with my machine.
Anyway, I am now able to back up my PDA on the computer, too.
It all sounds so simple, too, as if moving these functions to this machine and this operating system was easy. It should have been easy.
It rarely is.
Take the PDA for example. It should have been a simple matter of installing the software, connecting the cradle and hitting the Hot Sync button.
Installing the PDA software seemed to go well. When I ran it, though, it kept asking which serial port the machine should connect to. It shouldn't connect to a serial port. It should connect through USB. There are four USB connectors on the computer, two in front and two in back, and far too many USB cables on top of my desk, where the cradle is. When I finally found the correct connector and plugged it in to a live socket, it said it would load the USB drivers and reboot the system one more time (I lost track of the number of reboots).
But I couldn't update my LiveJournal connection because I ran out of memory. The newly installed software had uploaded two large picture files and a video, standard with the PDA system but which I had deleted previously, and I had to delete them again so AvantGo could talk nicely with LiveJournal.
I can now back up the PDA desktop (calendar, address book, to do list) but I still haven't installed the software to support the PDA word processor and ebook publisher.
And I still haven't reconnected my backup computer, which used to be my primary computer, in order to retrieve all of the data files and book files I have on the hard drives there.
Computers are labor-saving devices that simplify our lives. We can accomplish marvels impossible just a few short years ago.
And if it appears that we are living longer, that illusion is created by the increased levels of frustration making it seem to take longer to get anything done.
Recent Comments