It was good enough for my rhetoric master, and by Enki it’s good enough for me. This computer stuff was a big mistake.
Okay: I learn to my surprise this morning that I’m suddenly able to connect just fine. Maybe that will continue, maybe not. Yesterday was weather-filled and I’m used to my connection getting wonky during weather but not the way it did yesterday. When the hotspot can’t find a cell signal, that’s perfectly normal. When the laptop absolutely can’t see the hotspot, that looks like a hardware or software problem. Granted that my software is ancient and gets more wonky by the day, a reboot usually gets me past that and yesterday repeated reboots had no effect. So I don’t know if it was just a passing meteorological event or if I’m losing ability in an intermittent manner that will grow toward permanence, like my inability to connect with certain websites.
I really need an upgrade – which is right here beside me in the form of a couple of thumbdrives provided by a Generous Reader over half a year ago, but I’m afraid to use them because I’m a timid old phart. Frankly I was more comfortable around computers 30 years ago when they involved bolting hardware together and then running something off a disk. I understood that – at least enough to deal with it.
Anyway – I may have some nice content today – if I stay connected – but putting it together will be time-consuming and I didn’t prepare any of it yesterday for obvious reasons. So bear with me.
I was more comfortable around computers 30 years ago as well–the ones I worked on used MTTUs, and the disk drive was a platter better than a foot across. I knew how to work on them. Not worth a shit when it came to speed or memory capacity, though.
As someone who has played with computers all my working life – and for a large part of my free time as well – do NOT upgrade the OS unless you are CERTAIN that the build image contains drivers for all the hardware in the machine.
… or at least for the communications hardware.
The last thing you want is for the machine to be essentially a brick because you can’t get the connectivity to work without being able to connect to the manufacturer’s web-site to download drivers.
Generic is not good enough for a lot of the wireless devices out there – you must have the exactly correct drivers on-hand before you start the upgrade process.