Ireland day 1114. Wednesday 16 October 2024- Laptop Angst

Today’s summary	Spent all morning and half of the afternoon and them most of the evening trying to fix problems with my various PCs and laptops. Only partial success, though. Brightened the day by going on the usual hill / tea / coast walk and having a short video call with Val (back tomorrow). Regretfully had a pop pop meal for dinner (though it was supposedly a one of Tesco’s healthy options)
Today’s weather	Overnight rain then grey and murky all day and more rain late afternoon and evening. Light south easterly wind. Appx 14c

Today’s overview location (The green mark shows the location of my route)		Close-up location (The orange line shows where I walked) (Click button below to download GPX of today’s walk as recorded, or see interactive map at bottom with elevations corrected): Drizzly Hill Tea and Coast

Commentary

There are two things, more than any other, that are guaranteed to cause me frustration and annoyance. The first is Tax, and the second is Technology. The terrible Ts. Well the first is in abeyance at the moment (well more-or-less), and I though the second was too, until this morning.

While Val was away (she returns tomorrow) I thought I would take the opportunity to do some IT housekeeping. Believe it or not I have two laptops and a PC here in Malahide – I use them to provide backups of each other and also so I have a lightweight device to take with me when travelling. So I thought I’d fire them all up this today and start making sure all the files were up to date. That’s when things started to go wrong.

The first laptop suddenly developed a fault which meant that its built-in SD card reader stopped reading. Then the second developed a fault with its touchscreen. And then finally, the search function on the desktop PC failed. So I spent all morning and half of the afternoon trying to fix it all. I only had partial success I have to admit.

The touchscreen I couldn’t fix. So as a workaround I plugged in an external mouse and screen and disabled the touchscreen by removing the device drivers. So at least the laptop works OK, even though the touchscreen doesn’t. I couldn’t make the file search on the PC work at all, so I had to find the folders I wanted by manually scrolling through everything in file explorer which was tedious but eventually I got what I needed.

There was no easy fix to the SD card reader though. I tried all the hacks I could find on the web but nothing worked. In the end I did a full reset on the laptop which I thought hadn’t worked until – suddenly – the card reader started working again. I don’t know if the reset did the trick or if it would have just fixed itself anyway. So I had at least one properly functioning device again. The downside was though that the reset process deleted all my apps and custom programs which meant that I had to spend all evening downloading stuff and getting it back the way it was before it broke.

In between all this, though, I did manage to do about six hundred loads of washing, change the sheets, and go out for a walk. My excursion today was nothing spectacular – just the usual hill / tea / coast outing. Though because of the drizzle which later turned into a full-on downpour, I had to sit in the bathing shelter at Portmarnock to enjoy my refreshments. But despite the gloom, it was nice to get out and the wind wasn’t too strong so it felt OK. I even wore shorts! As a further cheer, i had a video call with Val – everything seems to be going well with her over in london.

So now my drivers are updated, my apps are downloaded and my hardware is fixed. So time to treat myself to a pop-pop meal now (one of Tesco’s supposedly “healthy” options) and put the technology to bed. Let’s hope it is still working in the morning!

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


You know it’s serious when you have to run the Windows Troubleshooter. It rarely works, and today was no exception to the rule	*A newly emerged shaggy inkcap toadstool (Coprinus comatus) growing in one of the meadows by Robswall. Despite its unappealing name, it is apparently edible*

Not much hope of seeing the Mournes today! Even Lambay was invisible in the murk	Hooray! The new loos on Malahide beach are open at last. They are nice but rely heavily on electronics to lock the door and make the taps work – I wonder how long they will stay pristine and functional? Not long I fear, if my experience with technology today is anything to go by.



Tide was well out today – it’s interesting to think that if the icecaps started growing again, a lot more land, like this, would be exposed as glaciers grew and sea levels fell. There doesn’t seem to be much chance of that happening any time soon, though