Yesterday morning after not sleeping all night I wiped the hard drives and reinstall Windows from an old version of Windows 10 I have.  One computer, the XPS which I just added 64 GB of ram to, seemed to be going wonderful, with no hiccups or problems.  Sadly the Inspiron computer just wouldn’t install windows or other programs correctly.  So last night I went to bed about 9 pm.   The XPS seemed ready for finial steps.  That was last night when I shut them all down.

However this morning when I went to start the computers, the XPS refused to start windows.   The computer started and the bios would work but windows wouldn’t start.  It seems something was preventing the boot manger from working.   Even trying to reinstall windows wouldn’t let the boot manager start.  In fact when I install a new version of windows and I delete the partition set up by the last installation.  However it was not deleting them and as soon as I tried to reinstall the partitions would reappear.   Well I was not out of tricks yet.  I pulled out another older version of Windows 10 and partitioned the C drive.   I could have done it with the same USB Windows install stick I had been using but I worried if there was a problem with that USB stick software.   Then installed the even older version of Windows.  Then I took the newer version and repeated that.  Then spent an hour setting up settings.   However after spending the morning doing updates and even installing some licensed programs which I do at the last as some of them have a limit to how many times they can be installed.  The full stop hard wall happened that screwed everything I had done on both computers.

Well shit and damn.  I have a keyboard and mouse that works on three different devices so I have my keyboard set to each computer and my phone.   My mouse I set the third device to what ever third device I am working on. But during all this I couldn’t get the flow system from the company to work.  That moves the mouse from monitor / computer by going to the edge of the monitor so that I had to manually change the computer via a button on the bottom of the mouse.  That meant I had to pick up the mouse and use the button every time I switched computers.  That is not something I can keep doing.  I race between computers hundreds of times an hour.  So I sat here and thought.  Each computer I dumped and reloaded and did the updates for hours over the last several days.  I figured out a workaround.  Since I had already done clean installs, I went into settings, to recovery and set both computers to “recover Windows from the cloud”, that would reset settings that were preventing my programs from working.  

Yes, yes, yes!   Well it worked.  It is 3 pm and I am sitting here typing on the blogging computer and watching Sam Seder on the other.  Once the recovery was done I installed the Logitech program for the mouse / keyboard which worked fine.  Then I installed the Norton antivirus malware, then installed my VPN, Nordvpn with its anti-malware, advance browser protection, and ad and tracker prevention.  So far everything is working grand.  

I am on day three with 6 hours sleep.  I stopped eating yesterday morning.  Yes I am tired, yes I got sick to my stomach this morning.  Yes my blood sugar got too low and I had to take glucose tablets.   But when I am focused on a problem food and sleep wait until I get it all fixed.  So all I have to do today is install all my licensed programs and clean the computers up.  

One last thing.  Several days ago an elderly lady I gave a printer to because she is poor and did not have one.  It is a nice brother printer that in its day was expensive but I had bought a new one and it was in my hoarder closet of electrical parts / equipment gathering dust. The printer’s computer was in error mode with an unable to clean error.   Sadly that is part of the built-in obsolescence of our for-profit businesses.  The error is caused due to the sponge that the print head uses to clean itself after use so ink doesn’t run all over the desk and the floor. Since they don’t bother to put a sensor in the sponge it is much easier (cheaper) for manufactures to simply put in a number of pages that will shut the machine down.  Once you get to that number the “brain” in the printer assumes the sponge is full.   If you know the magical steps and the correct numbers to input, you can clear the number of pages back to zero and your printer works again.  And tech people can charge you big money for doing this.  Sadly I did not like that game years ago and even as poor as Ron and I are, I only took donations for my skills as a technician.   

So either to your joy or bad disappointment after 3 days and 6 hours of sleep and only two meals even as Ron threatened to force feed me, I am back online with my computers fully running.  Oh during the time I worked on the two main computers I had the big 55 inch TV in my office on the wonderful swing arm Ron mounted running off my Xbox One and a small barely able to function laptop that I used to write most of this.  Hugs and loves to all.  Scottie