I love technology.

[BritinBretagne]

Emails have a lot in common with the activities of Merlin and others who follow his profession. Like the best magic we take them for granted.

Yesterday I wanted to send a photo stored on my phone to someone using an App on my iPad. I did what I usually do in this situation, I emailed the photo to myself. The email didn't arrive. I checked in the sent mails folder on my phone and it was listed as being sent. I checked in the corresponding folder on my iPad and it was there too even though it hadn't arrived in the inbox. I copied the photo from the sent folder on my iPad and sent to to my friend. The email with the photo attachment arrived in my inbox seven hours later. Where do emails go when they disappear for so long?

[dave21478]

Probably the same place my will to live goes to when I have to deal with computers.

Im not good with computers, but I can do the basics, am capable of using Google effectively and can follow instructions so that apparently makes me some kind of Bill Gates tier IT superhero by local standards.

The neighbour came round a while back. They had bought a new printer and it wouldnt work could I have a look...

I went over to find an older laptop that took a solid six minutes to boot up. Thats not an exageration, there is a clock on the desk. It finally loaded with Vista and it took a further 90 seconds to open a browser window. When Internet Explorer had finally ground into action there were 5 or 6 toolbars taking up the top quarter of the screen and the home page was some dodgy "search engine" I have never heard of. A quick look showed the computer was using the trial version of McAfee antivirus which had expired and not been updated since probably a decade ago.

"Yeah...no...I cant help you."

Which is code for "screw this..I just dont want to get involved in such a big and probably hopeless job".

Anyway, they came back about a week later, having apparently been "pirated" and had several hundred spent from their bank account on online transactions all over the globe. The implication was that this was my fault for not installing their printer the previous week.

No more favours for them.

Personally, I have a laptop in the lounge and a wee netbook I keep in the garage for music and a few vehicle diagnostic programs. Most of these are....not legit...shall we say? and the Chinese like to load up their cracked copies with tons of spyware so any computer you use with their products should never be used for anything else. This thing died.....metallic grinder dust is bad for computers...who knew?...so I got another netbook, also running windows7 and swapped my SSD into it after cloning the old drive onto it. I have been installing various programs but have hit a snag with Autodata, which just refuses to work. It was a hassle on the previous computer but I managed it in the end by trial and error, but I just cant get it to work on this one.

I have now screwed the netbook up to the point where it wont boot so needed to do a full recovery, except the recover partition has been screwed up at some point in the process of migrating to the SSD, so I had to take it apart, refit the old drive and re-clone it onto the SSD. I am back the square one with non-functioning autodata though.

Why cant stuff just WORK?