I’ve quoted a line many times over the years, always to get a laugh, but after events of the past couple of days, I’m starting to think it has crossed the line from humor to wisdom.
The late, great Cactus Pryor—the sage of Austin—was asked what he had learned from writing his first book on a word processor.
“Never click on anything that says ‘help’,” Cactus quipped.
I have a laptop computer connected to my home living room television. Yes it’s a smart TV, but I prefer using a wireless, full-scale keyboard as opposed to a little one-hand clicky thing.
Arising one morning, there was an extra light in my living room. It was the laptop. And that’s about all it was good for, a light.
It had hung not quite all the way back to Windows 10 after re-booting and wouldn’t budge from there.
Well, dummy, why did you tell it to re-boot in the middle of the night?
I didn’t. If you are familiar with Microsoft, you know they are big on “updates.”
Those are little admissions they didn’t get something right in the first place, so they have to keep issuing corrections to their work.
In some of their earlier Windows incarnations, the user was able to schedule when, or even if, they desired such updates to be downloaded and installed.
But with Windows 10, which we have been assured is the ultimate operating system (just like all the others were promoted to be) no such option exists.
That’s what had happened to mine. It, without my knowledge or consent, spent all night downloading and installing its little heart out.
And it improved my laptop to the point where I could not use it at all. I wanted to use it for something that morning, but it is oblong instead of round and would not have made a very good discus.
I went to my wife’s laptop, also running Windows 10, to make a restore flash drive to rescue mine.
It made one. Then her’s began downloading the same updates which had discus-ized my laptop.
I immediately turned that one off, prompting some tantrums about “never turn Windows off when it’s making itself better for you.”
I used the rescue flash drive. It didn’t work.
So I fished out all my old Windows 7 discs—this was the ultimate operating system Windows 10 replaced—and, after much effort, wiped my hard drive clean and reinstalled Windows 7.
I then found a workaround and turned off the program which tells Sue’s laptop to update.
It didn’t go quietly.
But, like Cactus, I did learn one thing of importance.
I learned why the publishing industry uses Macs.
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