Saturday, August 1, 2015

I think that my computer is losing its mind.

I will start off my admitting that I have five computers and an I-Pad but it is my main desktop computer which is giving me grief at the moment.


Since I teach computer to the fearfully inept (sadly a large number of my generation who didn't grow up with computers are a bit scared to use them) I feel that I need to keep up with what is being sold and I doubt if it will be possible to buy anything except a Windows 10 computer in a year's time.  Windows 10 was made available on July 29th and for a year it is a free download.  My desktop computer (which has been upgrading itself almost every day for quite a while) has been deemed suitable for the upgrade and yesterday I bit the bullet and started to download it. 


It was OK to begin with but eventually told me that it would be turning itself on and off quite a few times and that I should just sit back and relax while this happens.  So I sat and sat, the computer didn't turn itself off but the screen went blank and I became more and more worried that something had gone dreadfully wrong and that I had lost everything.  I tried to reactivate it by tapping the keys and by moving the mouse and nothing happened so I tried to turn it off using the switch on the computer.  That was when I realised that the whole thing had frozen so I gritted my teeth and turned it off at the switch to 'timeline' it.


When I turned it back on the screen came alive again with the message that the download had failed and that my original operating system was being restored.  So  -  I am sort of back where I started from.  I have a new program called 'Journal notebook" or something of the sort and I received a message to say that Family Tree Maker 16 was incompatible with Ancestry.com which would be fine if I actually had FTM 16 on my computer but I have FTM 14.


I have almost a year to download Windows 10 and will have one more try before I ask Techie to do it for me; he offered to "let me have a look at it" last time he was here to sort out a problem on my Windows 8.1 laptop on which he downloaded Classic Shell.  I don't think that Windows 10 is all that different to Classic Shell which is easy enough when that computer is working properly but it has installed a trial version of MacAfee Antivirus which has expired and I can't uninstall it and it is blocking Trend Micro which I had installed before.


I rarely use that computer so I have installed a free version of AVG and activated Windows Defender so hopefully that will work until the next time I get Techie to sort out all the problems which I am encountering.  I guess that it keeps me on my toes but I am beginning to think that downloading fixes for problems just  causes more rogue programs to install themselves.

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