Random 5 For Friday

I’ve a new knitting loom project in the works. I hope to get it finished soon. Here’s a sneak peak.

I bought a sunflower mat and butterfly flowers from the fundraiser my niece’s sorority was having. I wish it was warm enough to get these darlings growing, but that’ll be a couple months from now.

The freezing snap we had this past weekend bit our pear tree blossoms and made them start turning brown. The pear trees are usually so pretty with their dainty white blooms, but this year, they’re sad looking.

It’s warmed up a smidge here, it’s a dreary, rainy 42°. We’ve had so much rain that even the daffodils look sad.

 Earlier this week we had internet trouble. We bought a new router and thought that would fix the issues. Well, it did for about 24 hours then the issues returned worse than before.
I picked up our home phone to call internet support and was met with a shrill squelch and loud static. I checked our other house phone lines and they were dead.
I thanked the good Lord above for my handy-dandy mobile phone and then called the phone company and reported the issues.
They sent out a service guy and he discovered that our phone trouble was caused by line issues down-the-road-a-ways. It took 3 service people a few hours to fix the landline.
Our phone works great and the internet is faster than ever… Yep, you guessed it, we didn’t need a new router. However, since our other router was 4 years old, we decided to keep the new one. We’ll hang on to the old one for back-up.

I hope you all have a weekend free of cold and internet issues.

 

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My laptop crashed big time

Thursday evening, my laptop had a major crash. I blame the recent Window Upgrades on my issues. Ever since their new upgrading started, my laptop hasn’t been the same. I tried every fix I could, but it was beyond quick fixes. I was afraid I was going to have to buy a new laptop.  I determined to try everything I could to fix this one before buying a new one. I had to fix this one during 12-2016 so I knew there was hope.

I had to do a factory reset on my laptop and it took it back to Windows 8.1. I lost every program I had installed: browsers, photo editors, mail client and so on. Thankfully the reset didn’t delete any of my personal files. I think that’s amazing.
I’m very grateful to whoever made the option to keep the personal files and still do a reset. It’s a blessing and spared me from having to do a lot of uploading my personal files. I back up my personal and photo files about once a month to an external drive. I had just backed them up earlier Thursday. Thankfully, I didn’t need them though.

After the success of the reset, I decided to live with Windows 8.1 for a while, but that wasn’t to be.
I began to try to install my anti-virus and it wasn’t happening.  I went searching for a fix and on the list of things to trouble-shoot was make sure your Windows program is up-to-date, well flitter! I was going to have to install Windows 10 anyway. I surfed out the download file and began the many many hours of install. After it finished, I was able to install my anti-virus with no trouble.

I surfed around in the Windows 10 and discovered that the it’s install came with the recent upgrades (that made my laptop sick) and I don’t have to worry about them trying to install and crashing my laptop again (I hope)

It took constant work, but after 24 hours from the time my laptop crashed it’s fixed. I hope this resolves the issues for another year or longer. I’ve had my laptop for around 3 years. I’m hoping I can keep it running and functioning for another year or two. Time will tell.

Wishing you all an issue free weekend.

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My laptop crashed update

Well, I’m happy to report that my laptop is up and running.

It took over 20 hours, but the Dell Backup and Recovery seems to have repaired the issues. Windows 10 also did a couple hours of updates afterwards that seemed to help even more.

At the moment my laptop is running reasonable normal. I’m reloading and reinstalling my favorite programs and files. It’s almost like setting up a new pc.

I’ll be playing catch-up with my blogging this week.

Have a pleasant week.

greeter1

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My laptop crashed

I’ve had my laptop less than 2 years and last week it crashed. I’ve tried some of the self-help tech stuff on it, but it’s still broken.12-9-2016-ltI’m letting it run a backup and recovery program. It says it’s “attempting to repair partition table“. It’s been running it since last night. I figure I’ll let it run as long as it wants too.  My hard-drive is 1tb, I’m guessing it may take a couple days to partition it… or not… I’m so lost when it comes to pc tech stuff.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend with zero computer trouble.

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Nextbook Ares 7″ Tablet 32 gb Quad Core & WalMart Savings Catcher

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wmscDisclaimer: I’m not an affiliate of WalMart nor Nextbook and I’m not making any monies by mentioning their businesses by name. I want to share my positive experience with WalMart Savings Catcher that I’ve been using since August 2014. I originally didn’t figure we’d benefit much from entering our tickets each week, but by the first of June 2015 the little rewards added up to way over a hundred dollars.

In June, My husband told me about some of his co-workers having negative experiences trying to spend WMSC Money. He suggested I go ahead and spend mine since it was beginning to be a sizable amount, in case the program gets canceled or my monies disappear into a glitch.

Okee-dokee, sounds like a peach of an idea. I could spend it on whatever I want, but unfortunately, it’s not so easy for me to do. I’m not very good at spending money just to spend it and frankly I couldn’t find anything on WalMart website nor in the store that I wanted. I shopped and shopped to no avail.

I’d almost decided to buy to a trail cam to put out by the garden, but I was afraid someone might steal it. I decided to buy my husband some new tools, but he didn’t want any new ones. He didn’t want me to spend my WMSC monies on him. I found lots of little things that I could’ve bought, but I really didn’t want any of them, so I waited and then I forgot about it a few weeks..

The first of July I decided that I wanted a new handheld tablet around 7 inches in size. I like my KindleFire 8.9 but it’s somewhat larger than the side-pocket on my handbag and I wanted a smaller tablet that would fit better. I knew WalMart carried some small tablets in the lower price range and since I had the extra dough in my savings catcher, I figured that’s what I would buy. My WMSC had grown to $155.66. My main requirement for a tablet, next to the size, was it had to be at least 32 gb and have Android OS.

I prefer an Android OS in a tablet because of an experience I had in November 2014. That year I was super happy to get a Dell Venue 8 Pro 32gb. My happiness was short lived… Windows kept updating and eating the gigabytes. After I’d had it less than 2 weeks, I hadn’t installed any programs or even uploaded a photo to it and there was less than 12 gb left. I was so disappointed that I restored it to factory settings and sent it back for a refund. Bummer! Lesson learned… Windows OS and small gbs are not a good mix… Well to me it’s an absolute no-no.

While surfing the lower cost tablets on the Wal Mart website, I happened on the Nextbook Ares 7″ Tablet 32 gb Quad Core. It seemed perfect and it was only $59.99. ~happy dance~ I’d never heard of the Nextbook before, but it had everything I wanted and so I ordered one without hesitation.

While waiting for it to arrive I went surfing around to read reviews about the NBA7. I discovered that it came out earlier this year and it’s a limited edition. Most of the reviews were positive. I could hardly wait to get mine. Apparently, these NBA7s run as low as $49.00 up to $89.00, depending on the store and the sale going on.

2-IMG_4954My Nextbook Ares 7″ Tablet 32 gb Quad Core arrived a day earlier than predicted. I was absolutely thrilled. It came Wednesday afternoon. Oh my! I fell immediately in love with it. In my opinion for the price it’s perfect. After everything updated there was still 27 gb of free space. Awesome! My husband went to bed that evening while I sat up still playing with my new tablet. Thursday morning I woke up bright eyed and over-the-moon telling my husband about my new tablet. I was so happy with it that I begged convinced him to let me order him one. I still had $90.00 on my WalMart Saving Catcher Card, so money wasn’t an issue. I was so tickled that he agreed to let me get him one too. I ordered another NBA7 and 2 tablet cases. I ended up with less than 2 bucks left in my WMSC. I thought that was pretty cool how that worked out. 😉

Anyway, so a couple days later, my husband got his new NBA7. Now we both have a wonderful little tablet. I can’t get over how nice they are. The only down side I’ve found is that trying to do a registration is way more complicated than it should be.

Okay, now for the fun parts of the Nextbook Ares 7″ Tablet 32 gb Quad Core:
It has an actual file manager. It’s plain and simplistic, but at least it has one.
I installed a 64 gb micro sd card to increase the storage space.
With a micro usb adapter, I use a 32 gb flash drive that it recognized and I was able to work without any problems. Also it recognizes my camera and I can download/upload photos. (I couldn’t get The NBA7 to recognize any of my 400gb to 1 tb external hard-drives. I think it’s because they’re so large.)
NBA7 has Bluetooth: I have a bluetooth keyboard that works great with it. (a bluetooth mouse would work too)
I watch movies on NBA7 through Amazon and Youtube.
NBA7 has a Chrome browser and surfs the web smoothly.
Our Nextbooks has Android OS and they run faster than our desktop & laptop that runs Windows.
The Google Play Store offers oodles of free and pay apps you can get to use or play on the NBA7.
There’s an app called Office Suite 8 for creating and editing documents. I installed it, but I haven’t used it yet.
NBA7 has a front facing camera. I’m not a big fan of cameras, so my only comment is, I tried it, it works. I doubt I use it very much.

Unfortunately I can’t use a Kindle App for reading on my NBA7 tablet… I contacted Amazon support and a very kind and patient tech-guy thought that the app doesn’t work for my NBA7 because my library is way too large (20,000+ free books) The app requires too much ram to run because of indexing and it crashes my NBA7 every time.
I’m sad I can’t load my own 6 self published Kindle Books on it, but oh well 😦
As I understand it, If my Kindle library was small the app would work.
Fortunately, the NBA7 has a Nook app that works perfectly. My Barnes n Nobles library is very small, but I’m happy to have it.

*note — if you want to get a Nextbook, make sure it’s a 32 gb and not the 16 gb. Apparently there is partitioning issues with the 16 gb.
I have not seen a 32 gb in a WalMart store, I’ve only seen them online.

*note — Facebook games – This isn’t an issue with us, but you can’t play Facebook games on the NBA7. Or if there’s a way to play them, I don’t know what it is.

I guess I could go on longer about the Nextbook Ares 7″ Tablet, but I think I’ll stop now. The gist of the post was supposed to be about how I was able to buy some really cool stuff with my WalMart Savings Catcher money that accumulated little by little.

We’ve had our NBA7’s for over a month and we really enjoy them.
For our use, these little tablets are great and the price was just right.
Don’t you just love it when a good deal really is a good deal?

I wish you all good fortune and great savings!
Happy Shopping!

s-shopping

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Update on Windows Update install issues

IMG_6273My laptop tried again and again to install the Windows update. Finally on the last attempt I spotted a link for more help on resolving the issue. It lead me to a Microsoft fixit program to help resolve the issue.
I installed it and ran it and by-gum within a short time my laptop was fixed and the update was installed.
~sigh of relief~
For my daily computing, I was careful and didn’t do anything that it would be a problem if my laptop lost it in a crash. I read the news sites and did a lot of pinning.

I made plans to blog yesterday morning. With visions of visiting and commenting dancing in my head, I happily turned on my laptop and immediately was met with a notification to install 18 updates…
~falls on the floor sobbing~
With trepidation I clicked the button to install the updates…
Waiting and waiting and then finally they all surprisingly installed without a hitch.
But again, I was careful not to do anything that would cause me problems if it was lost in a crash… Back to news reading and pinning

This morning there was no updates and my laptop seems to be running okay. So here I am blogging again… hopefully I’ll get to visit and comment and be a normal blogger without any issues nor arguments from my laptop…

Just one more thing… In my opinion, the Microsoft fixit programs, that Microsoft has come out with, are some of the most helpful little programs I’ve ever run for resolving issues. I have a couple installed on my laptop that I run when I need to resolve general issues. There’s oodles of them out there, if you can find one that is directly related to a problem you’re having, sometimes the Microsoftfixit fixes it in little of no time.
Here’s alink to the Microsoft Fix it Solution Center mrfixit
There’s alot of solutions but remember to Use them at your own discretion, they may or may-not resolve or help or work for everyone.

Here’s wishing you all a week free of pc issues.
compuspgrnbgln

Beyond ticked-off – laptop issues

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©joysofcreating

Windows is being hateful this morning. It has my laptop bogged down trying to install a friggin’ update. It’s tried over a half dozen times. I have to restart my laptop every time. I’m so far beyond ticked-off I want to stomp my laptop to pieces.

I’ve looked for solutions and resolutions online and nothing helps. I’ve tried fixes, changed settings and still it won’t install.
The thing that makes me the maddest is the fact that I have no choice in this… I can’t even block the danged thing… it keeps downloading and bogging down my laptop and trying to install… restarts… then the whole cycle starts again…laptopbash

I’m typing this in Notepad I’m going to cut and paste in in a blog entry. I can’t do much of anything online for very long before my browser crashes and my laptop locks up.

It’s iffy if I can even post this. I’m going to try though…
I tried to make a post with my Kindle, but I don’t have the patience for it.
I’m going to blog as much as I can for as long as it will let me.
So if I don’t visit everyone today, know that it’s Windows fault.

I’ll be back when I can…

I hope your week is an awesome one.graphics-rainbow-260262

spgrnbgln

computer issues & storms :(

IMG_0933I’ve been experiencing some awful computer issues. Both our pc’s (laptop & desktop) went through official updates and then started acting ugly.

I work on our pc’s everyday and I’m getting them back to behaving better. There’s no viruses or anything. I figure the updates is the cause…

I haven’t been able to do much online lately. I’ll try to catch up on my blogging when I can. Unfortunately, we’re in the sporadic storms and our DSL isn’t very reliable and the electric keeps flickering. I hope I can get this posted before I get knocked offline r the power goes out.

I wanted to drop in and say howdy and let you all know what’s been going on.

I hope you all have a pleasant
trouble-free rest of the week!
🙂

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