WWBD

A blast (of snow) from the past.

I am not pictured in the photo above. I would have been 3  years old. I was probably inside eating playing with my brothers' trucks.

The photo is taken either by my Mom or sister 1944. Brother 1942 was off in the AF during this time. I think. I don't know.

He and sister 1944 are having computer problems.

You get an update or do something or the power goes out and your computer needs to/ or has to restart. You get  a black screen with one line of text. Windows cannot start because the blah.dll file is missing or corrupt. What do you do?

WWBD? What would Bill do (as in Bill Gates)? I know what Bill wants you to do. He wants to you run out and purchase the latest and greatest version of Window available. Preferably the Ultimate Professional edition of his OS and install it and begin using it.

My brother came close to hauling it off to the nearest repair center. He does not have very much patience (although he is very thorough and diligent).

After finding the installation disk I was finally able to walk him through installing a new version of XP onto his spare hard drive we purchased a month or two ago.  We would have repaired the Windows that was on drive C: but he did not recall his Admin password. Oops. After we installed a new version of XP on the D: drive my sister found the folder with the lost password. Figures. Heh, heh. Murphy's law and all.

We get that installed and I advise him to call the cable provider to have them set him up with Internet access. They can give  him all the numbers he needs to plug in, etc.. I also warned him about the time it would take the system to update that version of XP (four years of updates can take a while) once he does get back on-line.

The tech with the cable company says that he needs a new driver and a new cable and he will have to go to the nearest (insert greedy cable company name here) center and purchase them before he can get him access to the Internet. They probably did that when they first set him up... but who knows where that update is, now. What cracks me up is they told him he now needs an Ethernet cable to the cable modem (which I thought he was using)... whatever.. I guess he connects USB to the modem? Yikes.

Anyway, I was walking him through trying to access Word/Excel files and the phone kept cutting out. They have cable/Internet/telephone all through the (insert greedy cable company name here). My sister (who lives with him) let him use her cell phone and he told me he had enough of computer troubleshooting and was going to give it a rest after he called (insert greedy cable company name here) and got the phones and cable television working again.

Wow. What really scared me was how lost they were w/out the Internet. I would be lost, but I have four computers and two cell phones in the house that can access the Internet. I also have four machines at work, plus access to a lab of 25 computers that can access the Internet.

What do we do if the Internet goes away? Or collapses? Or the traffic gets so bogged down we can't move? When mine goes out I revert to reading the newspaper, etc... I know this subject has been beaten to death, but seriously what would YOU do if you lost your Internet access? And it wasn't coming back anytime soon.

My sister drove to Akron (her daughter's house) to check her e-mail (she needed a count for cookies she was baking for a Christmas lunch) and to take my daughter's dog out, also. E-Mail was not the only reason. :)

I had set her up with e-mail on her daughters' PC when she stayed there after her daughter's surgery. She did not know how to access her e-mail anywhere else but at home. My brother had set her up so that all she had to do was to click an icon and it opened Outlook Express and she went from there. Imagine me showing her (insert greedy cable company name here)'s webmail and trying to explain to her how Outlook pulls e-mail off the cable company's mail server and places it on the PC hard drive at her house. So that when she goes to her daughter's house and accesses her e-mail she can no longer see her messages. Where did they go? She did get it though after I drew pictures. Seriously. I do that for everybody when I explain things. I think it helps.

Now, I am trying to explain that to my brother when I suggested that once he does set her back up with her e-mail to not set up Outlook Express because she is always going places. To visit family, motels, libraries and she checks her e-mails at their computers. He is not getting it. Of course he has a lot on his plate right now. And I was not there to draw pictures. ;)

I told him tomorrow. Tomorrow I could work with them some more. Between Thanksgiving and New Years I do not have a lot of time. I am late already. I am supposed to have about a dozen things done this morning to get ready for today and I have not done a one. Sigh.