My Love/Hate Affair With Computers, Part 196

It's been a week in cyber-hell.

I use LibreOffice (www.libreoffice.org) as my document / spreadsheet reader and i'm very happy with it, but  a couple of days ago they prompted me to download the most recent version, and i'm a firm believer in keeping my software updated, so i did. Downloaded it and installed it.  Except that the d/l apparently failed and when i tried to open a document, i couldn't.

Okay, there i was without any way to open document files and / or spreadsheets, and becoming extremely frustrated. I tried to download the new version of LibreOffice again; after more than an hour at the stellar rate of 32 KB/sec, my Internet connection died. The download failed.

So, when i had a connection again, i decided to try Open Office. I used Open Office once, i prefer LibreOffice, but i thought, any port in a storm. Nope. Connection died, download failed.

So, thinking maybe i have more problems with my poor old desktop computer than i had imagined, i
plugged my network cable in to my laptop, and attempted to download LibreOffice again (figuring i could transfer it to a thumb drive and install it on my PC that way).

The download failed. This was NOT how i wanted to spend the evening....

And, just to make things even more fun, i seemed to have an eyelash embedded in my left eyeball, which turned it a fetching shade of red and also, rendered me basically monocular.

Jeez, how much longer do i have to do penance for the sins of my previous life...?

Then i had a thought. (Yes, thoughts do occasionally slither into my brain-pan.) What if i downloaded LibreOffice as a torrent...? That would eliminate any failures due to my wonky Internet connection. Tra, la, i had the software in a couple of hours, installed it and am now happily grappling with spreadsheets once more.

But wait! This tale isn't over yet.

The LibreOffice fiasco aside, my system had been running really slowly anyway. My Internet connection kept failing, but on top of that, everything was loading soooo slowly. (Does smashing your head into your computer desk in frustration, damage the CPU? Probably not.) And then, last night, my keyboard stopped working. My primary input device wouldn't input anything. I could open word documents now, but when i tried to type anything into them, nothing happened. Keyboard kaput. I couldn't take any more, i watched a movie and went to bed (after sending a few messages of despair to Facebook via my phone).

Today -- my day off. Sorting out the keyboard was easy. I simply used the Device Manager to remove it, and re-booted. Windows found it an re-installed it and now it's back to normal.

My connection -- in fact my whole system -- was responding even more slowly than usual and i was
getting super-frustrated (this was around 4 a.m., great start to the day) and i started to think, why is everything so slow? Is there something that i don't know about chewing up memory? My daily AV scan showed nothing nasty. So i went to the Task Manager and checked running processes and ...eureka!

Sometime ago, i installed some Samsung software that was supposed to help sync my PC and my phone and i discovered that it was using a huge amount of memory -- far more than anything else, and i didn't even know it loaded automatically with Windows! So i uninstalled it and ... ah, bliss. All is well. I haven't even lost my Internet connection since.

And i never used that damned software anyway, i'm not one of those people who wants their entire life on their phone. I'm old, i'd rather have in the PC....

I'm going to seriously have to consider a new PC soon, though. This one is definitely showing signs of age (and i'm still running XP, which has been condemned to death next year). Or at least a reasonably-priced refurbished Windows 7 machine (are you reading this, Troy?).

Anyway, here's a few additions to my CD collection series:

 And  a very brief playlist (i've been busy):

Rory Gallagher -- Notes From San Francisco
Rory Gallagher - Top Priority
Def Leppard - Yeah!
Various Artists -- The Great Grandson Of Morris On
John Fogerty - Blue Moon Swamp