Wednesday, December 27, 2017

Computer Woes

Watching my computer twiddle its little electronic thumbs is the new "watching paint dry," but worse. At least you have a painted wall after watching paint dry. A watched computer, however, may never boil. If it does stop twiddling, the odds of it having completed the assigned task are about even.

Computers are so frustrating. When they're good, they're very very good--and fast--so that our expectations are set very very high. On the other hand, when seconds and then minutes pass while it twiddles, it feels like hours, seems like days, and creates despair.

At the moment, I've just optimized one disk drive that needed it. The other drive that needed it wouldn't even let me try to optimize it. So I figured that a restart might help. Well, it might help, if the machine were to let me restart it. But no, it's stuck on the "welcome" screen where I've typed in my password, and now, five minutes later, the little twiddling animation has frozen in its tracks. Which is a really bad sign. I feel a 'control-alt-delete' coming on. Cross fingers. Nope. Now what?!

So I held down the power switch until the machine shut off, then turned it back on. Now we're back to the twiddling welcome screen--take two. And now it's frozen again. Bummer.

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