Finally, the web host seems to have gotten things back up and running after being down for several hours. Not that they bothered to tell anybody there was a problem (I don’t expect a personal e-mail, I guess, but they have a “support” Twitter feed that I follow and there was nary a word). I guess they figure if nobody noticed, then it didn’t happen. I’d go with somebody else, but, well, they’re cheap. Not as cheap as they used to be, though.

It’s been a weekend of computer problems. The latest issue was my mother-in-law’s crappy little netbook. She inherited it from my stepson, who had it trashed by Homeland Security a few years back when they told him he had to check it as baggage on a flight. Or something. By the time he bothered to mention it to anybody, it was too late to do anything about it. I guess. I wasn’t really involved.

At any rate, the screen is AFU and it only works with an external monitor so it’s been in a drawer someplace for the last few years. But the wife’s mother needed a new computer so she got this piece of crap. It’s got an Atom processor in it and has Windows 7 “Starter” edition. I bumped the RAM up to the max – 2 gigs – and that’s pretty much as good as it’s gonna get. It’s OK for what it is, but what it is aint much.

Her big complaint is that when she calls people on Skype, they complain of a little echo. So of course she calls Skype and they tell her that her computer is too slow. I tried to tell her that if it’s too slow then she needs to spend some money and get a better computer, ‘cuz this thing was crap five years (or more) ago, and it aint gonna get any better. She doesn’t seem to believe me.

So of course when she goes to various websites and gets popup messages saying “Computer slow? Install this shit and make it even worse!” or gets spam that says “we can make your PC faster” or “you have a virus” or whatever, she of course installs it and then I have to uninstall all this shit and then tell her, look, THESE PEOPLE ARE LYING TO YOU!! HONEST!!! STOP INSTALLING SHIT!!!!

Finally, I took away her administrator rights and gave my wife an admin account and if she needed to install shit she’d have to ask my wife who could tell her, “no,” but damned if she can’t figure out ways to install shit every now and again.

The latest issue was something or other about her doing a “Windows Update” and it had her put in a password (which she never needed to do before) and now she doesn’t know what the password is. So I’m supposed to fix it.

I managed to boot to a USB drive with UBCD on it and I cleared her password. It appears that she somehow managed to boot to the restore partition and restore the damn thing and now her account is admin and there are no other accounts and why she didn’t write her damn password down on a sticky and stick it to her monitor, I dunno.

I find this all very tedious and tiring. If I screw up my computer, that’s one thing – then I have to fix it. But when I have to repeatedly pay the price for other people’s fuckups, I start to get annoyed.

OK, I guess I’m done venting for now. Time to go put a second coat of stain on the back porches.