Bloody hell, technology is a real motherfucker.
Anyone who knows me knows that I love gadgets and I’m practically having an affair with my laptop. It was a good day on Christmas back in 2002, because Neil had bought me a super cool, superstylin’ Sony digital camera. The camera and I have been inseparable since then, until a sad little incident a few weeks ago.
I tried to use my digital camera and the battery was dead. I plugged it into the cradle to charge it, and zip, zero, nada. No response. It wasn’t charging. Time to get a new battery, then. Fine, except that I can’t find a Sony distributor in Xiamen that sells the model of battery I need. So, in the hope that Neil got my message and bought a replacement battery (50 freakin’ pounds), my camera should be back in commission over the next couple of days.
If he hasn’t, I’m not quite sure what to do.
But the real kick in the proverbial nuts is that the deadline and final work on What’s On Xiamen’s second issue is staring me in the face, and my laptop, my baby, has decided to pack it in. I suspect it has to do with some abuse AVG AntiVirus must be hurling at Microsoft Word (insults about Bill Gates’ mum? I’ll never know), because every single time I open a Word document, it ‘requests a virus scan’ and then promptly forgets itself and just… kind of… hangs. That fucking hourglass just sits there and refuses to actually do anything. Anything I try to do to close or restart it brings about the dreaded BSOD. If I manage to close it and have only my standard system tray programmes running, I get a warning message that system resources are running dangerously low.
I use a Dell Inspiron 2500 laptop that runs Windows ME (best I could afford at the time, don’t start with me), and I am diligent about running defragmentation, spybot scanning, and virus scanning. I’ve never had to reinstall the operating system since I accepted delivery in 2001. No, I haven’t opened any attachments. I have used less than half the hard drive capacity. I ran Power Defrag yesterday and it worked fine. I plan to run the antivirus tonight and see if that works. I will get on the Internets and see if it makes my computer shit itself. If everything works, I’ll know Word is fucked. Unfortunately, the one thing I need to use to write and edit the magazine happens to be Word.
I don’t know WTF is happening, how AVG AntiVirus managed to break Word, and WHY ON GOD’S GREEN EARTH IT HAD TO SMACK DOWN MY LAPTOP THIS WEEK OF ALL WEEKS.
Fuck.
Update: Jeff thinks it might be spyware. I’ll run Spybot Search & Destroy too, see if anything gets picked up.
Comments
25 March 2005
17:25
Mr Mist
Could be a number of things really other than the AV. Disable that whilst you try starting word and stuff though, just to be sure.
if you absolutely can’t get word working, you could download openoffice ( http://download.openoffice.org/1.1.4/index.html ) which would let you get on with typing stuff and be able to save in a word compatible format.
25 March 2005
23:21
kristen
i have no wisdom to share. only sympathy. :o(
25 March 2005
23:53
Terry
(sighs) I wish I could offer something constructive. If you really have to, turn off the AV program and get your work done. Then you can spend the next three weeks trying to find the actual problem. I recommend that people run Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D, and even these two can miss a couple of dozen problems.
Ad-Aware SE
SpyBot S&D
SpySweeper (30 day trial, so only use it if you know you have a problem)
Grisoft free anti-virus
Nod32 (what M$ used to use internall before they bought Giant)
< motherly lectuing mode > It always surprises me when people running a business from home never have backups. Of anything. < /motherly lectuing mode >
25 March 2005
23:56
Terry
fourth try, I will break them up to see if it is the number of links that is getting refused
(sighs) I wish I could offer something constructive. If you really have to, turn off the AV program and get your work done. Then you can spend the next three weeks trying to find the actual problem. I recommend that people run Ad-Aware and Spybot S&D, and even these two can miss a couple of dozen problems.
Ad-Aware SE
25 March 2005
23:58
Terry
sixth try, bloody hell that spam blocker is annoying. Only one link per post?
SpyBot S&D
25 March 2005
23:58
Terry
#7
SpySweeper (30 day trial, so only use it if you know you have a problem)
26 March 2005
00:00
Terry
#8
Grisoft free anti-virus
The nines and eights are hard to tell apart unless they are both in the same jpg. :\
26 March 2005
00:01
Terry
#9
Nod32 (what M$ used to use internall before they bought Giant)
26 March 2005
00:01
Terry
< motherly lectuing mode > It always surprises me when people running a business from home never have backups. Of anything. < /motherly lectuing mode >
26 March 2005
01:45
Derek
Well I see you’vre got the same advice I would have given to unplug from the network and run Word. You could also use wordpad which can save RTF files which are almost as good as Word docs. Hopefully that’s not screwed as well. And as Terry says make backups. Not sure if you can check for the last software update (as in XP) someone might know of a tool which can find this (maybe looking for registry changes etc.)
26 March 2005
10:56
Anonymous
Don’t know about the AV warning but my old ME machine would occasionally lock up when I tried to open Word. Dell CS said normal.dot was corrupted and to delete it (or move it to a temp folder) so that Word would regenerate a “clean” normal.dot. Sure enough, it worked. Of course, I don’t know if this is the exact same problem, so just fwiw.
26 March 2005
14:49
andrea
Anonymous wins the prize for guessing what the problem was. ‘Tis working fine now.
26 March 2005
15:24
Terry
Excellent!
27 March 2005
03:53
Jeff Trull
good grief, that’s weird!
27 March 2005
18:11
TuTu
If you have any other problems, i have a spare laptop (I can’t seem to sell the damn thing!!) with Windows, Office and a CD burener installed . You would only need to set up the wireless card etc.
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