Saturday, December 24, 2011

Crash, yes, but No Burn

I’ve never had a computer crash before, but about 2 weeks ago, I finished my business, shut down my laptop, and returned to it several hours later to find a blank grey screen. The Fujitsu logo flashed for an instant, but then … nothing. I removed the battery; I tried letting it “rest,” thinking that not using it would somehow change the blankness. I called around to find a shop that would take a look, then sent son the email, even though there was nothing he could do from thousands of miles away. Yesterday, my favorite international student came for a visit and we played computer repair for about 5 hours!!

Bottom line is that there was nothing, so with nothing to lose we wiped the hard drive clean, then started over. Yeah, all those files are gone, but I saved most of them on a flash drive within the last month, so what’s lost is lost, but what’s saved is still saved. Nothing else to do when nothing is working. It was challenging to get anything on the screen, but we plowed through it and used the disks that came with the laptop to reformat it, then used my purchased copy of Microsoft Office to put that back as it’s one of my most-used programs.

Somehow, we were successful and everything is working again. There are subtle changes so it’s not exactly “my” laptop again, but we’ll get there.

PS: 2 preferences I don't seem able to find are (1) my font for Microsoft Word and auto delete browing history upon leaving the web. Any assistance will be appreciated.

1 comment:

liz said...

This advice is dependent on what version of Word you're running. Assuming 2003 version, you should have toolbars at the top of the screen, under the menus. The second toolbar has the font box. It's probably too long and is running off the right side of the screen. If you right-click on a blank area beside the menu names, or beside the toolbars, you can click Customize. A box will appear with 3 tabs, choose the Options tab. Check off the box that is beside "Show Standard and Formatting toolbars on two rows".

Clearing your browser history can be done from the Control Panel. In the Control Panel, choose Internet Options. A box with multiple tabs will appear. The first tab that appears is "General". About halfway down is Browsing History.

*yedsms