Samurai Computer Repair

[howeird]

Went to Marilyn's, and with the help of SBC Home Network support, which is the keeper of the keys to the DSL modem I was installing, we got her onto the Internet. The RAM I brought with me worked fine, so now she has 1GB of the stuff, replacing the paltry 128Mb of slow memory which was in there. Between the two upgrades, we changed her boot-up time from 10 minutes to 2 minutes.

Next was a lovely home-made dinner - cream of mushroom soup and BBQ ribs with steamed veggies. Then, back to the PC to tackle the bigger problem - when she clicked on a Word doc, the PC would open Word, then lock up. If she opened Word first, she could open any doc just fine.

Turns out four different versions of Word were battling for supremacy in her PC:

• Word for Works 2003
• Word 2002
• Word for Microsoft Office XP Professional
• Word for Microsoft Office XP Standard (which I'd installed last time I was there, hoping the "repair" feature would pop up, but it didn't.

So I went into Control Panel and nuked all but the last one, did a repair on Office XP, and now her docs work like they ought to - with all that memory they pop up almost instantly.Then she shows me a doc in Word which is a list of all her recent remodeling costs, and she wanted to know how to add the column of prices. It was really better suited to a spreadsheet, so I showed her how to use Excel. She was amazed that she had never seen this program before. Now she is thinking of taking a class on it. Good idea.

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Got home and opened the box for the BT headset. It's really nice, comes with a carrying case and everything. It's charging now (it can charge either from its own adapter or from my cell phone charger).

Also opened the portable DVD player and discovered it only has video out, not in. So it's going back to Circuit City tomorrow, and I'll see if they have the Polaroid one, which does take input.