So last night & today, I’ve been in full-on tech mode, helping poor judiang get her PC back to some semblance of normal after it had been Geek Squaded (not a pleasant thing to happen to any technology). It’s currently having its OS partition joined with the formerly locked & hidden “recovery” partition which is now useless since it became Geek Squaded. Here’s hoping I don’t bork the OS!
We had a lovely day yesterday.
We had considered walking all the way to Whole Foods to eat at the food court & explore the food, followed by Best Buy to pick up an external drive. But Judi decided it was better to bus there and head to Manny’s for lunch instead. I was OK with that. Manny’s is a relatively famous cafeteria/deli in Chicago – even Obama ate there. You definitely don’t leave the joint hungry!
I ordered a bowl of cream of broccoli soup and half of a pastrami on a Kaiser roll sandwich (which also came with pickles and a potato pancake) and some strawberries. They put about 4 tons of pastrami on the sandwich and I highly suspect they gave me cream of chicken soup instead of the other (or else it just didn’t have much of a broccoli flavor). It was good, but I did leave some of my sandwich on the plate when we left.
Despite Best Buy being the home of the Geek Squad, we went there next so Judi could get a new external HD (her old one was a measly 320GB in size and she’s got 1TB of storage on her PC now) and a USB hub. She picked a WD 2TB external drive (me, jealous?) and the second cheapest USB hub and we were off home again. I then spent much of the afternoon fixing her music collection and beating iTunes with a hammer.
Did you know that, if you have to do a fresh install of iTunes with no iTunes backup, you have to go to the iTunes store and attempt to repurchase EVERY APP you originally bought for your devices? Thankfully, you don’t have to pay for them a second time, but you have to find & install them all individually. Thank goodness I don’t have an iPod Touch or iPhone. Judi’s gonna have so much fun!
For supper, we opted for default Thai. So we walked to Ma & I for pad thai (mine with tofu, Judi’s with shrimp) and while there, noticed that Marble Slab (ice cream joint) is open again for the season. So after supper, we headed across the street for ice cream. I got coconut, which was yummy.
Today, I had a light breakfast just like yesterday and Judi and I walked to Target for a USB flash drive. She couldn’t find the Ultimate Boot CD USB drive I’d given her a couple years ago for Xmas, so I recreated it on this new drive. It’s now doing what I said earlier. We went to A Capella for lunch, where we both got soup and BLTs. I had the tortellini soup, which was yummy. The BLT was yummy too. No one else was there in the restaurant, but that didn’t stop our waiter from being late serving Judi her tea…
We WERE going back to Marble Slab for more ice cream, but despite an opening time of 2pm (which it was), it wasn’t open when we arrived. We popped into a corner store for a bit, but 15 minutes later, the joint was still closed. We walked back, sad that there’s no ice cream.
elsaf is apparently on her way. Here’s hoping she’s having an easy drive today!
Tortellini soup sounds good, though of course I like pretty much tortellini anything. Yet again I read one of your posts and come away from it hungry… 😉 You probably can’t diagnose this without more info–the kind I undoubtedly don’t know how to obtain–but this afe at my sister’s I noticed that her Dell desktop was being super-slow and/or completely uncooperative in some cases; she’s running IE (I sang the praises of Firefox to her, cos I’ve had hardly any problems since I’ve switched to it *touch formica*) and I could not get Google to load whatsoever–I mean, not even Google? Really? Thus I couldn’t check my gmail, and only was able to get Twitter to load once. Their att.net home page loaded fine, as did Bing, but everything still was super-slow. Since I’m what passes for the tech guru in my family–yes, be very, VERY afraid–I flushed her browser cache and then asked if they’d run any of their system tools programs like Disk Cleanup/Defragmenter and the like recently and my brother-in-law said yes, and that there was something like 70% free or whatever, so what would be making their browser so wonky? Is it just IE being crappy as usual, or could it be something else? Virus-wise, they’re running Norton (and I know some folks run into conflicts with that). They’ve already had one occasion wherein they had to take everything off their hard drive & put it onto what my sister called a “memory stick” (is that the same thing as a flashdrive? The thing she showed me was a lot bigger than my flashdrives, though), then something was done to their compie remotely from Dell that fixed it, but right now they’re just using this compie for computer games, cos their internet is so unreliable; luckily Jeanne has a brand-new, lovely ‘n sleek lil’ laptop (I think it’s an HP–definitely not another Dell) so they still have interwebs. Like I said, I know this probably isn’t enough or the right kind of info, but any insights you might have would be much appreciated; they have so much (entirely unfounded) faith in my compie-wrangling abilities I feel compelled to try and live up to this perception, flawed as it is. 😉
It’s pretty bad when I’m reading your symptoms and wonder “Is she gonna mention Norton?” And you did. I’ve seen Norton take an older machine down to a crawl before (my uncle had purchased & installed Norton 360 and it turned his OS into sludge). However, if it’s only the internet stuff that’s slowed, then that could be a corrupted IE (how many toolbar addons are installed?) You could see if installing Firefox gives them a faster ‘net connection. You’re correct, though, in saying that I really don’t have a lot of info to go on yet. I’d recommend updating them to Microsoft Ubuntu, but if they want to play their games, that’s probably not an option. 😉
Ooh, now you’re making me feel dangerously close to smart, because aside from suspecting Norton, I also thought they had waaaay too many toolbar add-ons! I don’t think they probably even noticed that they’ve got so many–sheesh, there’s Yahoo, there’s Bing, there’s Google, just far too many–and I started to remove them, then realized I should ask which ones they like/use the most; yeah, once in a while I remember not to be a megalomaniac and ask permission first…ya know, just to mix things up and keep it interesting. 😉 Is there anyway to counter-act the Norton sludginess, other than uninstalling it? I somehow knew you were going to suggest Ubuntu, since you did that for me too! XD I haven’t had any virus problems with this PC ever since you advocated and I installed Comodo *touches formica again* so would you recommend installing that & taking out Norton? How many more questions can I ask before this devolves into billable hours? 😉
As I tell my coworkers: Will work for cookies! 😉 The only way I’ve successfully counter-acted Norton’s sluggishness was to uninstall it. But I have no patience for that software, so there may be less sluggish settings/versions. I still like Comodo as firewall and as antivirus. I’ve used AVG for antivirus in the past as well and it’s good (and free). Kapersky is recommended by the Ohio school techs, but I dunno if that’s a for-free or for-pay. Nobody likes Vexira (but I think only schools can buy that.) Great work on thinking of the toolbars. Those things are insidious. I don’t use any (but I’m a snob).