More Suckity, Suck, Suck...

I fucking HATE Bill Gates!! Oh sure, he's a useful son of a bitch so long as everything is going fine and dandy, but if he has to talk to someone else or his product fucks up... well, suckah... you on you own!

Here's the techno-hell I've spent the last couple of days wallowing in. This actually goes back to when IE7 was released and nothing else on any of our PCs would work with it. Well, the Dell wasn't too bad, but the Sony's were totally fucked up. Not only would McAfee and AOL not talk to IE7, but Sony's little pain-in-the-ass irritant pre-loaded programs just made the situation worse. I'll never buy another Sony because of these what-the-fuck-are-they-for programs like uPnP framework that Sony only occasionally graces us with fixes for. Anyway, on my Sony, I was able to restore to a pre-IE7 checkpoint then uninstall McAfee and AOL. Redownload IE7, reinstall AOL then McAfee. McAfee fucked up AOL, so I uninstalled them both again and reinstalled McAfee BEFORE AOL and this time installed AOL9.0VR instead of AOL9.0SE, which just wasn't ready to play nice with the other two. So, YEAH! I was back in business. Went over to the kid's Sony to do the same thing and... uh-oh... they had no restore checkpoints. Evidently one of the little geniuses disabled the automatic checkpoint creation!! So there that Sony has sat since then because I KNEW it was going to take a l-o-o-o-ng time to fix. And I've let the little buggers come use the Dell in my office.

And one MORE thing that was fucked up by Bill Gates little IE7 bomb- my PDA could no longer sync with my Sony. Blew both the PDA AND the SONY up every time I tried. Which means no new ebooks- a state that is starting to make me twitchy!

So this brings us to this week's techno-hell. I've got 4 ebooks to read and judge for the Passionate Plume Awards. I don't particularly like reading ebooks on my PC and prefer to curl up and read them on my PDA. So I figured I better get my PDA and Sony talking to each other again. I uninstalled then reinstalled ActiveSync. That went okay. I popped the PDA and it's sync cable into a USB. Alright, the Sony saw it and recognized it. Cool. I started ActiveSync and... nuthin'... ActiveSync could not find any device to sync to. So, the Sony knew it was there, but ActiveSync said it wasn't!! So a few more of these tries and I realized that my PDA had blown up again like before- frozen solid! So I unhooked it, did a soft reset and tried again. This time I blew both the PDA AND the Sony up again!! Okay... fuck it!! I needed to walk away.

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Yesterday brought more techno-hell. I decided I was going to fix the kid's Sony. Now I knew that the only way to fix it at this point was to completely reload it from the Sony Recovery Disks that came with it a couple of years ago. That actually went quite smoothly and I repartitoned the drives while I was at it. Cool. Then I reach around, through, over, and under their desk and get the system unhooked and lugged into my office where I can use my faster ethernet cord instead of their slower wireless connection to bring Windows, McAfee, and AOL up to date. Since we are talking a couple of YEARS worth of updates and multiple system restarts, this took all damn day. FINALLY I was done with that, but in the meantime, after frantically searching, I could not find installation CD for their Netgear Wireless USB Adapter. So, off I go to Circuit City and buy a new one. When the updates finished I thought I was home free because the USB Adaptors have never given me trouble. WRONG!! I never did get the little son of a bitch to work!! That little sucker and that fickle bitch, Windows, just wouldn't acknowledge each other!! By now it was after midnight and I was getting dangerous so I called it a night...

This morning, I had to get up and take my youngest son to his basketball game. We travelled 45 minutes away to play... wait for it... the other 5th grade team from his own school which is 5 fucking minutes away from us and sitting empty!! Oh well, at least there was a Coldstone Creamery on the way home.

So after that big fucking ordeal of digging my way through a major shopping district on a fucking SATURDAY, I come home and turn MY Sony on. It has some windows updates waiting to install... fine... I click install. I click on AOL, then I get this "Svchost.exe Application Error. The instruction at.... blah, blah, blah". And my Sony freezes... in the middle of Windows update installs!! I had to switch the power off in the middle of fucking Windows update installs!!

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Oh, and, according to Microsoft's knowledge base, this is a KNOWN problem and they then give some techno-bullshit-only-for-fucking-NASA-scientists ways to try and fix it!!

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So, I restore back to a checkpoint from 2 days ago- no change. Restore to a week ago, still no change. I restored to a MONTH ago and I still get the damn error message!! Now I'm getting desperate because Windows firewall says it's not working. I tried uninstalling McAfee and AOL in case it was another conflict with that group of ne'er-do-wells. I reinstalled them and now, even though I still get that damn svchost.exe message, the system doesn't freeze up. But it's not fixed and I have a feeling I'm going to be reloading my Sony from scratch. Only, I have too much data to just blindly do that. So off to Circuit City again to buy an external hard drive- which I really should have had before now instead of using CD's for PIA backups. And did I mention that my Windows bars and such are now taupe/grey instead of Classic Windows Blue? Yep, even tried to change them back but the Sony thinks they're still blue!! Curiouser and curiouser!

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I just can't wait to see what happens when I try to install the external drive tomorrow! Oh joy! And I still have to finish fixing the kid's Sony AND get my PDA to work- which I think I might try syncing with the Dell instead. Of course, that will probably fuck up the Dell and we won't have ANY PCs working right around here! Oh, and did I mention that I don't have a clue what the fuck I'm doing???!!!

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And if that's not enough, blogger is thoroughly pissing me off right now because it keeps putting extra blank lines between some paragraphs and taking out other ones. AND it isn't showing them in the preview- they only show up after I post!! So, now I'm reduced to putting "~" where I want a paragraph break!