Tuesday, September 23, 2008

We just can't win

Our new computer arrived early last week. We thought that was a good thing. But honestly, it has been trouble from day 1. It constantly disconnected from the wireless network, froze and gave us USB errors, causing bad shut downs similar to the old machine we were trying to improve upon. So we did some reading online and followed the instructions. Some few hours and another $20 later things seemed more stable.

Until my hubby went raiding in WoW that night. Then it froze and we had to power down. Again, USB errors and aggravation. I went in to work the next day and bitched to my boss that Vista sucks and it's a power hog and he looked at me like I had grown a second head. "Bring it in."

I wish I had been able to convince my hubby to heed my boss' advice. Instead the problem grew steadily worse. We finally called Dell who had us run the diagnostic and told us it had to be software and that we needed to go back to factory settings and start again. *Sigh*

Guess what? It's even worse now! I started up this AM and no sooner had I established my wireless connection than it just crashed. No freeze this time, just a blue screen and error code. It then restarted itself, and seems ok now, but I wasn't going to push my luck, I'm on the old computer now.

So basically what I have learned is that Vista is conflicting with one of the three programs I have put on the new machine, but not entirely sure which one:
1. Firefox
2. Thunderbird
3. World of Warcraft. Now that would just be brilliant, seeing as how this machine is literally built for gaming and it won't run the one game we want it to. And unfortunately, up until late last night this seemed the most likely culprit as the crashes occurred most often whilst WoW was running.

The damn thing is going into work some time today. I would quite honestly love to box the bloody thing up and send it back to Dell and call it good :(

Good news and bad news. Bad news is it was Warcraft that was conflicting. Good news, it wasn't conflicting with Vista. And it didn't have to go into work with me after all. Bad news, it's conflicting with my virus software. Good news, all I have to do is turn off it temporarily whilst playing. All in all, it's still a pain in the arse. I'm tempted to put McAffee on instead...

For me.

It's been a long winter. Mentally, I feel even worse off than I was before, though things are finally looking up. I abandoned the gym. I...