I've got a sinking feeling that a {bleep}ing pdf file isn't the only unwanted thing I got.
All yesterday, George (my laptop) was acting funny. The internet refused to work properly, to the shock and dismay of the hotel staff. They finally managed to get it up in the late afternoon, to mutual relief. (That's when I posted the "disregard this post" post in the social club.)
After dinner, however, it was again fubarred.
But while it was working, I got a few disturbing... clues? Hints? I talked Dan into setting up the desktop, and the internet is once again working fine - on this machine. Which backs up my suspicions. Furthermore - I just tested - and the desktop (which really needs a name) isn't having the same oddness George had yesterday afternoon.
I feel like I'm being vague, but there were lots of symptoms.
1. The way the internet connection is set up here, you are allowed to go to three websites (the telephone book, the train schedule, and the hotel's webpage) for free. If you want to do anywhere else, you have to ask the reception for an access code, which they will give you for a fee. When "the internet was screwing up," I was indeed able to go to the hotel's website and the train website. But the telephone book site was somehow off limits, and my access code would simply not go through. In both instances firefox displayed a blank page after several seconds of "waiting for {bla bla bla}."
2. Last week, George bluescreened for the first time since I've had him, and maybe the first time ever. I was simply fed up with fooling with the blasted pdf (which was too big to email anyway). There is a LONG (and somewhat amusing) story that I'm not going to go into... suffice to say that I learned a new lesson in German quality and got some HONKING BIG FILES. (I really oughta tell that story. Not here, though.) Georgie bit it when I tried to open one of them, and later bit it again when I tried to open another. I put it down as "{bleep} these files are big," scaled them down enough to make them feasable and didn't worry about it.
Until yesterday afternoon, when I was surfing and George bluescreened again. Twice. For no obvious reason. (I mean, one of those time I wasn't even at him. I got up to get a sweater and came back to a rebooting computer.)
I totally meant to send the resized files to some of my buddies. I'm now really glad I didn't get around to it.
3. Just because I am the freaking icon of irony... {bleep} and scupper, there's another funny story. Later.
Also yesterday afternnon, I ran a standard search on Yahoo. It popped up the list of links, I found a likely one, and clicked on it. A tab popped up that said "redirecting." Odd. I didn't tell it to open a tab. The "redirection" was strange, too... instead of a linux forum (I did tell you it was ironic, didn't I?) it opened up one of those cheezy "welcome to YouMistypedYourURL.com!! Please use our search engine!!" sites with all the ads. I tabbed back to Yahoo and tried another link. Same thing, only this time I got an internet poker site.
OK, so Yahoo is messed up. I'll try Google. Same problem. I did discover that if I asked it to open the link in another tab, it was just fine. Hence, I managed to get answers to my questions... if Ubuntu would support my new scanner and Hamachi.
You see, I'm in Germany, I've got the time, and as soon as we got the desktop set up (just in case!), I was going to make good on my threat to install Linux on George. I was sick of the constant Windows updates reminders, I need to reinstall the Gimp anyway, and Georgie is getting on in years. Plus I've (finally) got a distro picked out AND (here's that irony again) I was getting royally sick of the anti-viral program grinding everything to a halt. In the States, it just slowed my webcrawling's speed to that of a snail with a limp. Here, where the connection is more iffy, stuff kept timing out. Screw it, I've been meaning to install Linux for something like the last 3 years anyway.
Um. Only now, I'm not sure I can. Do I need to de-virus a machine before I install an OS that will render viruses ineffective anyway? And if so, how? I've also been wondering if I need to load all my files onto a thumb drive before proceeding... and now I'm not sure that's a good idea. Am I going to lose all my files?
Almost all my pictures have backups on this machine, so I'm OK there, but... my novel is on George.
Um, Oh great comptuer gurus of Skincell, please... helllllllllllllllllllllllllp?
