My Dell’s Computer Screen (at the moment) – Photo: L. Weikel
Aggravation
If you take a look at the photo that’s leading this post, you probably won’t need me to write many words to convey to you the source of my aggravation. Thank you, Windows.
Higher Being help me, it seems like every time I try to ‘do the right thing’ and either backup or update one of my devices, it is rarely a benign event.
All My Fault
It’s probably all my fault. (I know; hard to believe, given some of the travails I’ve written about in times gone by.) Specifically though, yesterday I had the brilliant idea that I should do a global backup on the external hard drive I bought back in June for just that purpose. I don’t know what made me look at it, but the box in which I keep the hard drive crossed my path and I realized I’d only backed everything up once – the day I bought the hard drive. In June.
I must’ve been delirious with spring fever because I jumped right in and clicked on something that ended up backing up the entire laptop again, instead of just the documents and programs that had changed since June. Ugh. Imagine my internal freak-out when the screen informed me that the process would take four days. FOUR DAYS?
That’s what it said, but it only took – in actuality – about nine hours. Yea!
Lulled Into Trusting My PC
I will admit, I was feeling pretty badass. Undeservedly, as it turns out. But hey, it felt great while it lasted. I woke up this morning and that baby was backed up. Sweet.
So after working a few hours this morning and into the afternoon, something rather large and prominent appeared on my computer advising that Windows reeeeaaalllly needed to update either to Windows 10 or make changes to Windows 10. I don’t know. I forget, honestly. All I know is, it was telling me I didn’t have enough free space on my device to properly install these updates. But – and here’s where I got lulled into believing I could do this – it specifically said that if I connected an external hard drive to the laptop that had ‘x’ amount of free space (which I knew my hard drive had) it could get the job done all by itself.
Hell yeah!
I was totally stoked that I actually knew how to do this (ya know – plug the hard drive into the laptop via a USB cord – high stakes technological know-how) and would be able to avail myself of the latest improvements to my operating system.
A Fool and Her Laptop
And so I blissfully followed the Windows update instructions, connected the external hard drive, and crossed my fingers that I wasn’t going to mess up all my applications and programs and everything else I’ve worked so hard at becoming haltingly familiar with using.
Imagine my horror when I left the laptop to work in another room, only to come back two hours later with the assessment pictured above – but instead of 18% it said 0%. 0%! After two hours!
The photo accompanying this was just taken by me close to midnight. It’s been ten hours. It’s at 18%. And if that weren’t bad enough – it’s been at 18% since 8:30 this evening. It hasn’t budged a single percentage point in (looking at my watch now) over four hours. Good grief.
So aggravation is my word for the day. Aggravation with a dash of terror around the edges.
Here’s hoping I wake up tomorrow with a laptop that’s zipping along with a whole new lease on life.
A girl can dream.
(T-267)