They say that things come in threes - how true that is.

I have had three electronic disasters in the last two days, two of which were my own glitches and one was at COTA.

On Thursday I dragged myself off to COTA feeling decidedly not the best.  Himself had no clients to I had two computers to play around with.  The one which I normally use  -  and whose desktop is rapidly filling up with shortcuts which I am powerless to move into folders.  I have been told that I must not move, for example, the various parts of MS Office into a folder because someone "might need them".  They are shortcuts, for heaven's sake!  But I can't move them anyway.  According to the computer only the Administrator can do that and the Administrator is the company which services the computers.  They just refuse to be dragged anywhere at all.

Anyway, the computer which I use refused point blank to connect to the internet and refused to connect to my hotspot  -  fair enough since it is hardwired.  So I moved to the computer which Himself uses (read about shortcuts and desktops here) only to find that although it connected to the internet the scroll bars didn't scroll so we were stuck with just what first came up when we opened a page.  That is where I got angry and demanded that my client should be given her money back.  The outcome is that the Administrator will be summonsed to sort out the computers and my client will be getting four lessons over the next two weeks  -  and I will take in my own computers.

And she wants to learn PowerPoint!!  She is fairly new to computers and has a broken-down Win 7 laptop so I have had to do a fast learning curve on PowerPoint just in case she really wants it but suspect that it is spreadsheets which she really needs.

Then yesterday when I was trying to grab a picture from Facebook the whole screen went long, narrow and tiny  -  like a very thin ribbon.  Nothing worked to bring the normal look and every page I tried was the same so eventually I had to do a system restore.  Luckily an automatic restore point had created itself about 30 minutes previously and it worked and now we are back to a proper screen again.

Then last night my Kobo E-reader dropped out and froze.  I didn't think that its battery was flat but tried charging it.  I realised that it was more serious when I found that  it wasn't registering on the "it is safe to remove ... " so I went online and learnt how to restart the battery.  It is a matter of sticking a straightened paperclip up a little hole in the bottom of the e-reader.  Thank goodness it worked and I have my e-reader back again.

So now I know how to reset the e-reader's battery and I have worked out how to compile a PowerPoint presentation  -  should I ever need to do so.