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Author | Topic: Computer Help Please? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5946 Joined: Member Rating: 5.5 |
I had gotten DSL over 15 years ago and for the past 11 years I've been working with a cable modem plugged into a wireless router. As such, I am undoubtedly the least likely helpful person.
However, what we have as the source for all our information is a person who is not tech-savvy (and I do mean that in the most non-blaming non-judgemental manner that could ever be possible). I cannot feel but that we do not have the whole picture here. It seems to me that we eventually need to have something plugged into that wall jack. But it keeps sounding to me that we are removing what is currently plugged into there and plugging it into something else. Which would leave us with nothing plugged into that wall jack. That leaves me confused. Much more confused than is normal. The archetypical New Englander remark is, "Ye can't get the'a from he'a." (please apply the accent you have heard oh so many times). Well, we know neither "he'a" nor "the'a", so how can we figure out the transition? First, we need to determine what the final configuration needs to be. In one software design class, the process was described as first specifying what the outputs had to be, then determining what the inputs needed to be to produce those outputs, followed by determining how we needed to process the inputs so that we could get the specified outputs. Faith, what is the final configuration that you will need? What is the initial configuration that you already have? From those, you can then work out a step-by-step procedure for getting from he'a to the'a. You may very well need more hand-holding from your service provider (AKA "the internet technician"). Or you may be better off hiring it out to your service provider or to whomever. To everybody else, please chime in as to whether I'm steering her right or wrong. I did grievously wrong her very recently, so I'd rather not add to my karmic load.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5946 Joined: Member Rating: 5.5 |
To clarify: The internet is functioning, but I don't have a phone until I switch this cord. Having reliable phone service when you're older and living alone is vitally important. I started living alone again in 2005 when I was 53. I had no land-line, but I did have a cell phone provided by my company. However, the reception on that service was poor for where I lived. Then I spent a Labor's Day weekend where I was extremely sick, apparently from food poisoning. After that, I had a land-line installed. I never give that number out except when I don't want to be bothered by those calls -- if they really want to talk with me, then they will leave a voice-mail. I pay nearly $50 per month for that land-line. But at least in a real emergency I know I can get a call out for help. Please do whatever you need to do to give yourself a reliable means to summon help when it's needed.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5946 Joined: Member Rating: 5.5 |
Here's what happened, as I can piece it together and as told from my own perspective and through my own experience.
I agreed to an upgrade, though I balked at initiating it for fear of ending up with a 16x16x7 paperweight. Windows 7 had been installed by the store and I didn't have any CD for it. Plus I had tried to run the Windows 10 compatibility test and the entire evolution devolved into Microsoft's attempt to follow itself up its own aft orifice -- it seemed very upset that their Internet Explorer was not my default browser. And of course all that filled me with the appropriate amount of confidence in the system. Then early last week they announced that my upgrade would start on Thursday, 19 May, at 2300h. So I backed up what I could and left my computer on overnight. The next morning, Windows 10 had installed and for the most part everything is working. I'm not comfortable with the entire look-and-feel, since as retired military I prefer everything inside an ugly gray box (AKA "Windows Classic"). Every time I switch to a new version of Windows, I feel very hampered, like I cannot do anything useful anymore. It can take me a few years to work past that. Windows XP was great, once I switched from its ugly Fisher-Price user interface, so I wish that we still had that interface (especially the search function!). I have Windows 8.1 on a laptop and it is exactly like Apple software: it reminds me that I still keep my hair cut very short so I don't rip it all out in frustration. But, Windows 10, so far OK.
The only thing I haven't been able to find is my set of games, but they are very hard on my eyes so I'm glad to be rid of them. I hope I don't discover where tney are hiding out
Yeah, I used to play Freecell so much I just created a desktop shortcut for it. Gone. It looks like they've gotten rid of all their own games and instead point you to some games vendors. All for the better, since this way I won't be wasting so much time on a game and can spend more time updating my creation/evolution pages (http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/ -- I'm currently updating my page on Kent Hovind's bogus solar-mass-loss claim).
There is a voice-activated feature that I can't use because I don't have the necessary audio arrangement -- and let's put it this way: if I do have it hidden somewhere I don't want to find it.
That would be Cortana, which is Microsoft's answer to Siri. Yes, you can hide it. Also, you can type in your query rather than deliver it verbally. Play with her and decide whether she can do the job or not. Cortana is also on my phone (Windows 8.1 -- absolutely hate it on a laptop, but it works well on a phone). I've asked her a few questions and she would always respond with some totally unrelated links. So I asked her, "Hey, Cortana. Do you always change the subject?" And she completely changed the subject. OK, so now I know exactly where I stand. No, I hardly ever talk to her at all. I have a new car that links to my phone via BlueTooth. It has its own "Bitching Betty" (standard Naval terminology for a user interface that employs a female voice (which, according to "The Andromeda Strain", is fairly standard since pilots respond better to a female voice, though a local radio DJ would disagree -- see below). My car's "Bitching Betty" does such a poor job of understanding me that I just don't use her. But when my phone receives a text, the car will play it for me and then Cortana will take dictation as I give my reply. Cortana takes dictation far better than Bitching Betty ever did. So if you were to ever get a microphone or headset, you might want to give Cortana a try. Also, there's a speech recognition feature since Win7 or possibly earlier in which you can speak your text instead of just typing it in. I don't think that such audio hardware is very expensive. Just a thought. Andromeda Strain and that local DJ. One of the more fascinating aspects of Michael Crichton's first well-known novel was his inclusion of various scientific and government studies supporting the premises of his novel, even though I'm sure he had made up most of them (eg, the "Odd Man Hypothesis" which most married men would immediately recognize as absolutely true). One such study had supposedly found that both men and women respond more readily to a female voice, so the decision had been made to use a female voice in all such interfaces, such as in fighter jet cockpits. Different information about that from actual fighter pilots in Vietnam revealed that they were being so bombarded by sensory inputs that their brains literally started ignoring most of it. A classic case was an American pilot shot down over Vietnam who had no idea whatsoever that there was a bandit on his tail, and yet in the recordings we can plainly hear his wing-man warn him repeatedly of the bandit who was on his tail. Then a few or more years ago one morning on a local radio show, we heard of a conflicting study. The DJ was informed of a study that women's voices operated in a frequency range that men just do not hear. So on the air he called his wife to tell her that this study explains everything. She had been asleep, so his call woke her up. Excitedly, he explained everything to her. All she did was to hang up on him. Every single married man in the area knew that he was a dead man walking. Other than that, Faith, some of what you knew may still be there. Yes, you are now supposed to work through the Settings dialogs, but you can still access the Control Panel if that is easier for you. The future has snuck up on us yet again! Maybe we can get it to work.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5946 Joined: Member Rating: 5.5 |
I don't know if Windows 10 has the same flexibility as Windows 7, but Windows 7 can be configured to look and behave pretty much like Windows XP.
Well, the look and feel issue is just my resistance to change. And the command prompt window, CMD, is much harder to read which is a problem for me since that's where I do most of my C programming. But I'm sure that Windows 10 has not fixed the big problem of how badly they broke the search utility when they went from XP to Win7 (I assume that the actual breaking was in Vista, which I completely bypassed). I'm sure that Microsoft's attitude is just like CompuServe's when it broke the interface and rendered it completely useless: "Look at all these improvements we're making! Who could possibly care that we're rendering it completely useless?" Besides that, every time they come out with a new version we have to figure out where they're hiding this time everything that you need to access. Troubleshooting network issues was easy with XP, but horribly difficult with Win7. Though if Win10's Settings doesn't work for you, you can still use it to find the Control Panel.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5946 Joined: Member Rating: 5.5 |
Went into the properties and that did it. Thanks.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5946 Joined: Member Rating: 5.5 |
On XP and before, you could search by filename and/or by contents, both of which could be, and most commonly would be, different from each other. Plus you could specify a range of dates for when that file was last created or changed (that feature in particular came to my rescue more times than I want to remember when my then-wife, who absolutely refused to ever learn anything about naming files and knowing where you put them, would complain loudly "Why can't I find my file on this stupid computer?" as if it were my fault).
On Win7, we lost all of that. All you can do now is give it one search string which it would use for searching both by filename and also by contents. And far too many times I would point it directly at a file with that specific filename and it could never find it. Oh, now it lets you attach metatagging to your files (Mac envy!), so now I have to go through all my text files and attach tags to them for every possible search I might make in the future? Nor can I run grep anymore, since my 64-bit machine rejected it. There is a new command-line with its own complex syntax, but my experiments with it revealed the same problems of not finding a file that's standing there right in front of it. I also encountered hints of a complex search syntax that you can use to refine searches, but it proved impossible to find any information on what that syntax is, even from Microsoft itself! They broke it, so they need to fix it! Which of course will never happen.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5946 Joined: Member Rating: 5.5 |
Basically, I did look when I encountered this problem six years ago. I tried several of the solutions I found and none of them worked. At that point, I saw no other course of action available but to just give up.
The best solution I found was to install VMWare Player and use it to run WinXP so that I could perform searches on my text file archive, as well as to run 16-bit apps.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5946 Joined: Member Rating: 5.5 |
That was over five years ago, but I'm sure that I had found those dropdown options. I'm also sure that I had found them to be useless as well, perhaps because they required special syntax that was undocumented. Or perhaps because search couldn't even find itself with both hands and a flashlight (refer back to how it couldn't find a file even when I pointed it right at it). Even the third-party apps I tried didn't work. So half a decade ago I just gave up on it.
I did have Cygwin installed on my Win7 machine, mainly to be able to experiment with C99. I haven't yet tried to see if it survived the migration to Win10 (or WinX? Or WindEx, which is supposed to cure everything?).
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5946 Joined: Member Rating: 5.5 |
This is based on my Windows 10.
Windows-R. Run Control Panel. Over in the right column (on my computer; actual mileage may vary) is a "Ease of Access Center" option. Click on that. Options include magnifier, high contrast, etc. In the list offered is "Make the Mouse Easier to Use". Some of those options include changing the size of the mouse cursor. I don't know whether that will help.
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