Dave vs Technology, Part Three

When I last of wrote my struggles with our computer and printer, we were struggling with getting the printer to print envelopes in tray 1 automatically. I’m here to say we finally got that issue resolved. Spoke with a rep who just had me change settings on the printer itself. No, that did not work. I spent an hour on the phone with another tech who took the time to check driver settings, printer settings and finally ended up checking settings in Microsoft Word. He was showing me an alternate way to create and print the envelope, by going over to the left tab, choosing the size of the envelope and so on, when I said, “you know, my wife is not going to buy this” and personally I wasn’t buying it either. After all, when we first got the computer and printer, before the big crash of last month, everything worked perfectly. Why is it so different now? I had him change all the settings back to the way they were. He took a look at one more setting in Word, and found one that was set on Manual, not Tray 1. He changed it, and voila, the printer now prints envelopes automatically. FINALLY!!!

That’s the good news, but NOW, it seems that the newly refurbished computer won’t open any web pages. We click on the Internet Explorer icon, it opens to the page that says “waiting for aol”, while a little blue circle spins in the middle of the blank page. Tried to go to another website, and got the same little circle with the message at the top that says “waiting for whatever web site you’re trying to get”. I should also mention that we noticed a loss of some data about a week ago, and that’s what happened before it crashed in December.

I spent 90 minutes on the phone with a tech support rep who ran all kinds of scans, and updated drivers and declared no critical issues with the laptop. He also uninstalled and re-installed the Bluetooth/wifi driver, messed with Internet Explorer to not much avail. He did manage to get online long enough to download Google Chrome to use as an alternate browser. He said something about compatibility issues with Internet Explorer.

That evening, Ginger was able to get online to check her email and play some word games. Personally, after looking computer screens all day at work the last thing I want to do at home is play on the computer. After a short time the game stopped working, so she closed out and tried to get back on line to no avail. She tried the Google Chrome browser and that didn’t work, either. Last night neither browser worked, and this morning I managed to get online but couldn’t sign in to anything. We have two other laptops and we can get online on both of those.

So the ball is back in their court. There’s obviously something wrong and I have reached out to their tech support folks again. Yeah, this is driving me crazy.

And last weekend, the dryer quit drying. That guy is coming out today.

Sigh