Computer Woes: Tech Issues that Apparently Only Happen to ME

I am so tired of computer and technology issues that seemingly only have ever happened to me. It's a pattern that I've put up with--as a PC Guru, a title I've unwillingly taken on--for many years. It goes like this:

A problem or quirk--sometimes very minor, sometimes quite major, but always annoying--will crop up on my PC, or in recent years on my MacBook Pro, Android Phone or other electronic device. I'll try to sort it out myself, but then will seek out answers on the Googles and Bings. Rarely, I'll find the answer I'm looking for, and bada-bing, problem solved.

More often, it goes like this:

- Problem crops up. Usually, it's replicatable, and often it has happened before to me on other systems, and was never resolved.
- Seek answers via Google, Bing, what have you.
- Find several responses that seemingly fit my query.
- Several responses lead to paid "help" sites, arcane uber-techy sites, hard-to-navigate forums, and often, dead links.
- Some answers list steps for resolution that either a) have no effect, or b) have steps that simply can't be done, because that menu or link or button doesn't exist on my system.
- Some answers begin with fishing expeditions by other techies who obviously have no idea what the issue is, because they start with, "well, what were you doing when it happened," "what programs are you running," "what are the CPU loads when that happens," "why are you trying to do that," "try turning off your virus checker/firewall/whoziewhatzit," and on and on. They don't know. They're fishing for a cause, because this problem has no known resolution to them.

I end up frustrated, mostly because it's impossible I'm the only one this happens to! Let me give you some examples of the problems that regularly occur that piss me off:

- Typing--just typing--slows to a crawl in a browser, usually in a simple response box, such as a comment board in Slate, Salon, or other news/blog area. It can be something as basic as a comment box using Facebook's or Disqus' format. Glacial, character-dropping, time-delayed typing. Something that should be so simple and basic that it never happens.

- While trying to scroll a Twitter feed, the feed begins bouncing around, pictures inflate and deflate, sending the whole feed up or down, and making reading very frustrating.

- A browser tab will bring up a white screen with no text, and the twirling "wait" cursor icon. This isn't too odd, but then it will knock out the rest of the computer's brain, affecting other programs, the task bar, dimming the display, sometimes everything, until the wait state is done. . .doing whatever the hell it's doing.

- My old Samsung Galaxy S4's overheating and battery devouring problem. A known issue that the Googles apparently don't remember, and offer no useful solutions for (I feel guilty for trading that phone in, for the guy who buys it reconditioned).

- My old Samsung Galaxy S4's (and The Other Half's S4's) inability to work properly with Bluetooth, in cars, and often other devices, and seemingly birthing a secondary problem where the speaker and/or microphone would simply stop working.

This is a very short list of the things that have happened to me, mostly across multiple devices, where I'm met with. . ."well, what is your model number/serial number/processor version/Windows version/Android version," and other forms of fishing. I totally get that a person has to ask questions with unfamiliar troubleshooting issues. But why are these problems unheard of, if they happen to me across devices???

I'd like to point out also that I'm kind of an early adaptor, and when it's financially possible to have the latest-and-greatest, I try to get it. Well, maybe not top-of-the-line, but decent, well above entry level. My main PC is 64-bit with a high-speed, quad processor, and scads of RAM. Should time delayed typing really be an issue? It can't be just me if it's happened on all of my systems, at work and at home, in various versions of Windows for years.

/rant

Frivolity Break: My Cable Box Has Lost its Mind

I meant to take a shot during The Big Bang Theory, when it read something like Pits Dang Bob. Most of these are indecipherable, but these are kind of the normal channels.

I am most interested in pets The Virgin, NCIS: Goes Daniel and The teens Remains the Same. I do know that The Jeff is really The Simpsons, and that The Western Maddow out is The Rachel Maddow Show. The show descriptions are just as screwy.

Unexpected Major Purchase Throws off Blogging for the Night

After a year full of household renovations, I didn't expect to have to make another major purchase for a while. But as I noted yesterday, I came home to a blinking, flapping, noisy refrigerator when I came home from work. I scheduled a repairman for Tuesday afternoon, and took off early to meet him.

Here's where repairmen get you: I'd already laid out the problem to the call-taker. The repairman had the information. It's a common problem with my particular refrigerator. But he had to come out to the house, charge me 50 bucks, and then tell me he can't do anything that day. In fact, they'd have to take out a part, send it to the manufacturer, and have them fix it, if they can fix it.

Minimum, this was going to cost me $600, and take anywhere from now til June. All of that time would be spent with no refrigerator in the house. I realize this is a whine, since I have the old unit in the garage, but it annoyed me anyway. So, I paid the guy his fiddy, and sent him away.

Then, I got in the car, and headed to Home Depot. Having already looked up three selections on my Mac while I waited for the repair guy to get me a quote, I went right over to them and compared. I narrowed it down to a Samsung, an LG and a Whirlpool. Then I zipped over to both Lowe's and Sears Outlet for a quick comparison, and back to Home Depot for the purchase, narrowed down to a Whirlpool, both on advice of the salesman, and due to features I liked better.

The  fridge will be delivered Friday, and they'll wheel the old (hey, eight years doesn't seem old for a fridge, but there you go) beast away for free. And my Discover Card got a bit of an unexpected workout. I thought I got a better deal than I really did though. It's true, the original price was $400 higher, and indeed at Lowe's, it is. But a search after the purchase found a price just a little higher than I paid everywhere else. So, the artificially-imposed "ending soon!" sale at Home Depot didn't make much difference.

In any event, I'll finally have a brushed stainless refrigerator, and the price was about what I paid in 2006. Now, I have to wonder, will this one need replacing in 2022? Oh my god that sounds far away, doesn't it? But now, I guess I'm not going to get much if any blogging done today. We'll see if I can find something before time to turn in.

Ice2-Oh No!

Way back in 2006, I had recently dug myself of a decade-long debt hole. I was free! Free at last! But I was advised to strategically rebuild my credit. Buy a largish item on credit, pay it off over two or three months. Wait. Repeat with small items, big items, etc. Never take a bite too big that you couldn't pay for it all at once. And I tell you, it worked like a charm! I really did rebuild my credit rating, and by 2010, it was doing pretty well. And then after buying my car that year and paying it off, the credit is sterling. The aim now, is to keep it that way.

But back there in the beginning of debt-free life, it was a little daunting. For my first strategic purchase, I'd decided on a new refrigerator. Prior to this, I'd never bought an appliance that expensive. Other fridges were either provided with an apartment, or were hand-me-downs. I'd decided that I wanted a Maytag Ice2O refrigerator. It was the first model with French doors, a bottom freezer drawer, and water and ice through the front. It was a big purchase, but I managed to find a floor model at Home Depot, and I'd settled for black rather than brushed stainless.

It started us on an appliance-buying trend over the next year, mixing the stainless with the black, and it looked great. But from the first couple of weeks, there were problems. I've detailed them here in a previous post, and I just noted that I started the post almost exactly the same way! Anyway, as noted, the water through the door never really worked. I was foolish in not insisting that the water line be properly fixed, while I had a warranty. So, it's never been fixed.

When I came home from work on Monday, I was greeted with a different problem. Clunk! Clunk! Clunk! The ice machine trap door was popping open and shut on its own. The control panel was blinking like a 60s sci-fi movie computer. I tried tripping the circuit, unplugging and replugging. Nothing worked. Clunk! Clunk! Clunk! Endlessly.

So, I've got a repairman coming tomorrow. I've managed to squeeze all of the food into the garage refrigerator. The Ice2O is unplugged and empty. Pulling the beast out was a trick, after the new granite (which has it wedged in pretty tight), and the fact that it's always been missing a screw-foot. So, since this is going to cost me through the nose anyhow, I'm going to see if this guy can also fix the water and the missing foot! It's worth a shot. And if the price estimate goes over a certain dollar, I'm booting the repairman, and going and buying a new fridge. Goddamnit.

Blogging Takes a Backseat (Technology Woes)

I'm late getting to blogging, because of a bit of crossover between my day job and my weekend job. A couple of months ago, I got a cloud drive, to make file management between work and home easier. But you know what? No matter how "intuitive" the technology is supposed to be, it's just. . .not. Ever. I'm a tech head, and I have to strain my brain. What do ordinary people do?

So while I work, enjoy this video about why cats are better than dogs.

Technology Woes: One More Smart Phone Bites the Dust (Or, Why Cell Phone Insurance is a Scam!)

I've had this blog since mid-2007, at which point I was on my second cell phone, a Samsung flip-phone with very little in the way of extras. Since I've been blogging, I've talked about my new ones, beginning with the Samsung Rant, a pre-smart phone with a slide-out keyboard. With that one, I learned how to text, but was frustrated with its other limited abilities. When it was unceremoniously drowned by The Other Half in the washing machine, I was pushed--finally--to join the smart phone crowd.

This was 2011, and I was holding out to see what the iPhone 5--which turned out to be the iPhone 4S--was going to be like, and if Sprint was going to carry it. But it was in May, and Apple didn't break into the Sprint store until September, so my choice was between Blackberry, Windows Phone and Android. But to make matters worse, we were leaving for vacation the next day, and I had researched nothing. So, I ended up with a Samsung Transform, a low-end 'droid.

In the ensuing three weeks, I struggled with the Transform's limitations, and read up a lot on what else was available, and ultimately paid the restocking fee, and traded up to the Samsung Epic 4G. To this point, I'd had five Samsung phones in a row, two flip phones, and three slide-out QWERTY keyboard phones. Other than the drowned one, I'd never had an issue with any of them throughout their contracts, other than quirks here and there that required reboots. And the persistent spotty Sprint service, particularly in central Ohio. The Other Half had drowned a flip phone once, but like my Rant, it was right about at trade-up time anyway.

My poor, crushed Epic 4G

My good luck with phones-without-insurance lasted from December 2004 to July 2012, when I stupidly left my phone on the hood of my car in the garage, and drove off with it there. Somebody ran over my Epic 4G, 8 months out of re-up time. My solution was to order a used one on eBay, take it to the Sprint Store, and activate it to my phone number. Nice plan, but the phone had been rooted, and would not activate. So, I paid Sprint $35, got my money back from the eBay vendor, and Sprint ordered me another Epic. By this time, I was up to 11 days phoneless by the time the order came in and it would not activate either! My only option was to wait for another one, or accept a substitute: an HTC Evo 4G.

The Evo was a contemporary of my phone, meaning a two-year-old, obsolete model. It was better in some ways, and lesser in some ways from the Epic, mainly in that it didn't have a slide-out keyboard for the first time since my flip-phones. But the upshot was, the screen may not have been as crisp, but it was easier to read outdoors. And, it seemed to be a lot less flaky than my Epic, which was a lemon compared to The Other Half's relatively stable Epic.

I couldn't wait for the iPhone 4S, so I got the Epic 4G.
Now, Apple has sued Samsung, partly over this phone.

Six weeks into the ownership of the Evo, I started to notice dust collecting between the layers of the screen. Very annoyed, I tried to tap it out, I tried to blow it out, nothing would budge the dust. And then, unexpectedly, the microphone stopped working, leading to a comedy of errors when my brother was trying to call. Nothing would make the microphone work, though if I shouted at top volume, it would register, barely, sounding like a blown speaker.

Could I have broken it when blowing and tapping it? Not unless it was on the edge of breaking anyway. So, I took it back to Sprint, taking an hour off of work so that this wouldn't push into next week like last time. They took it, charged me $35 more bucks,  and. . .couldn't fix it! So, guess what? I have another Evo 4G on its way, and I have to queue up at Sprint again Wednesday night. I am not confident that it will go smoothly, but I have no complaint with the Sprint people other than the tedium while waiting at the store.

But in all my travails in cell phone world, I can give a little advice:

- When buying a phone, don't cheap out. You're going to have it two years, don't start out disappointed. An extra $50 divided over two years is bupkis.
- Even if you like a slide-out keyboard, give an on-screen one a try. You might find you like it, and the phone will be slimmer and--let's face it--less dorky.
- Check your pockets before doing laundry, and never--never--put your phone on your car.
- I'm glad that I've never had phone insurance. It may have saved me a few buck in this case, right now. But if I'd paid $7 per phone per month since December 2004, I'd be up to $1488! Just in insurance fees. My total out-of-pocket cost for all of this so far? $70. Big whoop!