Freelancer's Office: Blog

In desperate need of money to pay the bills, I have been trying to get back to work.  This morning I tried to log onto my desktop computer only to find that it is once again displaying the same symptoms it had when I was forced to reset it to factory specifications.  Whatever the trouble was, it has not been fixed by the last reset I had performed.  At the moment I am trying to get it to start up at all, and failing miserably.  I can’t use my little laptop as a full-time computer, it would burn the poor thing out to try that, so I am just doing whatever I can to figure out how to get the desktop computer working again.

It really really ticks me off that the thing has malfunctioned now, when I am least able to get a replacement for it.  I don’t know what I am going to do, but if the stress does not slack off it might just be to run down the road screaming.

I’m not sure what the story behind it is, but the PDF to Word converter that had been on today’s Giveaway of the Day is no longer in the offering, my assumption is that the Giveaway of the Day folks swapped out what was supposed to be given away tomorrow for the PDF to Word Converter pending their being able to contact those guys and find out why the activation was not working right, but I’m not sure.  I hope that it comes back up as a Giveaway of the Day, since I would love to get the chance to review that program for my writing blogs and websites.  There is no way I could afford to buy it, but I think it would be a very good tool for writers - three pages of conversion does not give me enough to guage the program by, however, so I’ll have to wait and see if it is offered up tomorrow or maybe later in the week when they sort out why it was not working as a download today.

Very  disappointed that it didn’t work today, but hopeful it’ll work out later on.  Going to go take a closer look at the offering that have for today.

The glitch won, I ended up having to reboot my computer and reset the whole thing to factory specifications.  Very very annoying, but at least it seems to have salvaged the computer as a whole and made it possible to avoid buying a new desktop computer.  That was not something I had been looking forward to the prospect of possibly having to do.

I’m not sure just what is up with it, but my desktop PC has started wigging out on me in the mornings.

It will start up, but then it shuts itself down without warning and restarts, this happens again and again.  I’ve tried to restart it and tell it to go back to the last known working setup, but it still does it.  I even tried to start in Safe Mode, but that just seemed to make it freeze up.

I ran Avast on a through scan of it, then ran a boot-time scan that took all night to run through every file and document on the computer.  This morning, when that failed, I went and had it start downloading updates from Microsoft, including the Malicious Software Removal tool thing and some various security updates I had not realized I had missed out on installing.  With luck that has fixed the problem, but I am considering downloading a 30 day trial of McAffee or Norton or whatever to try running on it and see what that turns up for me.

I know it is not over crammed with things, since on a  177 GB hard drive, I have 137 GB of free space.  So it is not a case of having overloaded the poor thing with junk - shoot, all I use this thing for is work, I have no time in the day for messing around with stuff, so I don’t have the computer over-loaded with junk typical of so many computers.  I have been watching the Giveaway of the Day site for programs that can help me with my work, however, and suspect I may have somehow picked up a nasty from that site - not sure, but that is the only place I have downloaded anything from.  And I am vehement in not opening unknown e-mails.  Could just be the computer is having hardware issues too, I just don’t know.

I’m hoping I have the problem fixed now though, so we’ll see if this keeps up tomorrow or comes back later on.  I did just notice that the name of the computer was set to you-(something)  was a series of letters and numbers, about ten of them.  I have never officially named this computer, so no idea if that is a standard default naming system for Windows or if some Trojan might have warped the name for cracker purposes.

I’ll keep an eye on that, see if the name changes from what I set it to or if any other weirdness appears.  For now I have to get back to work.  Need to earn enough that I can replace this sucker if I have to.

I am having trouble logging into the calendar to update it, it’s still there and visible and everything, but I need to sort out why I can’t log in and then I will be able to start updating it again.  Really annoying way to start off the day, and does not bode well for how my day is going to go after this.