Windows update Archives - Owl Medicine: Shamanic Healing

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)

Spartacus – Photo: L. Weikel

First Hot One

I wasn’t sure how I wanted to title tonight’s post. Obviously, it’s a commentary on Spartacus’s sprawling position under the birdfeeders today. With his toy and a bottle nearby (albeit of olive oil), you would be forgiven for assuming Spart had partaken in a night of debauchery. Instead of “First Hot One,” I nearly named it, “What a Night!”

I chose “First Hot One,” because like clockwork, the solstice occurs and we get slammed with oppressive heat and humidity. And that definitely was the case today, although I know the humidity can (and will) get even worse.

But today was one of the first days of truly summer weather. The thunderheads gathering in massive, billowing threats on the horizon struck fear in our hearts as we crested the first hill on our shorter trek. A jagged flash of piercing lightning struck just ahead of us, and almost instantaneously a massive thunder clap let us know that jagged strike had issued forth much closer than was comfortable

Sheila’s daily constitutional would have to be cut short tonight, which was not a welcome development for either of us. I needed a walk. Desperately.

Crisis Averted

Why? Because unbelievably (in hindsight), I tried to help my laptop complete its Windows 10 update (which it insisted on telling me day after day was needed) but which it kept informing me was unable to be consummated because I didn’t have enough memory on my laptop. So I bit the bullet. I took care of business with an external hard drive and moved some files around.

And I forgot Mercury was retrograde.

I actually forgot that messing around with my laptops when Mercury is retrograde has not ended well for me in the past. Indeed, I’ve even written about some of those debacles – at length – and the disastrous results that, for one thing, explain why I write all of my posts on my Apple instead of the Dell.

How did I forget the sins of my past?!

Black Screen White Cursor

Well, that just goes to show how we can get lulled into a sense of complacency and then – bam!

All of a sudden, I was looking at a black screen. Not a blue screen of death (thank goodness), but a black screen that I couldn’t coax into doing anything else. No control-alt-delete. No holding the power button down for a really, really long time. Nothing. In fact, it looked as though the power was off, although eventually a white cursor seemed to randomly show up. But that was it, the only concession the machine would make to me bringing it inside. (Karl insisted it was probably just hot.)

And that’s when it hit me that I’d been to this rodeo with this stupid computer (the Dell) – once before – during Mercury Retrograde.

All’s well that ends well (so far anyway). It looks like this snafu may have been connected to the Windows update.

Would someone please remind me never to update Windows again when Mercury is retrograde?!

After all was said and done, believe me when I say that I felt like Spartacus looks in that photo above. Worn the heck out.

So much for the first hot one of the season.