Aw man

Weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth........
.....from the other room (the other day, Saturday, November 1, 2008; after Linda worked at the post-office that morning).
“Aw man,” Linda said. “All my settings are gone. No desktop, no shortcuts, no icons, nothing.”
“Now I gotta rebuild everything,” she said. “I got some message about a corrupted file, but that’s usually been resolved with a reboot in the past.”
Thus began a day-long effort at reconstructing her PC.
“What a pain,” she kept saying.
I could trumpet the superiority of MACs, but that’s not fair, since I had to do a similar rebuild a while ago.
But not for the same reason.
My original OS-X, as installed in this machine, was “Jaguar” (10.2). Every once in a while I got a minor update message, so I did them — they were free.
A while ago I bought an update from Jaguar to Tiger (10.4). —That’s update, everyone, not a clean install.
About seven months ago, Apple introduced “Leopard” (10.5), so I bought that.
But that was a clean install, plus it didn’t have Classic-Mode.
Being a clean install, Leopard lunched my old 10.4 desktop, and replaced it with a desktop short of all my so-called “shortcuts” (PC language).
It also replaced my desktop picture (GG1 #4896) with a generic Apple desktop-pik.
It also replaced my “dock.” That had shortcuts to the various applications I have; far more than my original OS-X dock.
The new dock didn’t have the stuff I had in my old dock.
Fortunately, OS-X stored the old system in a “previous-system” folder.
So I dragged it back into my Start-up folder, and dragged Leopard out.
VIOLA! Hello GG1 #4896 and my old desktop, but I still had to reconstruct all my browser bookmarks.
FireFox (for example) was still in my machine, but just the app. We couldn’t find the “bookmarks” file. (Fortunately I don’t have 89 bazilyun bookmarks like Linda, who bookmarks everything. I only have maybe 20.)
The new (Leopard) dock didn’t have FireFox, although I’m sure it will someday.
OS-X currently uses Internet-Explorer 5.2, and a browser of its own (“Safari”). —FireFox is superior to both; especially Safari, which is a turkey.
Leopard also tossed my Windoze Media Player, although I think QuickTime plays wav-files (and .wmg).
Worst of all was its lack of Classic-Mode.
I have a slew of classic apps that only play in 9.2; they won’t function under OS-X.
OS-X has a resident 9.2 in it: Classic-Mode — although Leopard no longer has it.
Worse yet is OS-X’s refusal to accommodate a macro-function.
I have Appleworks-6, which is OS-X compliant, but it doesn’t have the macro-function.
Well, I need that macro-function, which is in 9.2 compliant Appleworks-5.
Okay, I could save what my macros write out in a copy/paste-able file — I already do that with footnotes, and, for example: “Do yaz remember that, Boobie? Sounds like ya might have a memory problem. Maybe ya should have that checked. Maybe yaz need Arigent®.”
But quite a few of my macros are HTML-tags, and my famous BALONEY ALERT! macro, is partly HTML-tags (e.g. the red font).
Okay, so save BALONEY ALERT! as a file, and I’m sure I could find a word-processor that inserts HTML-tags.
Linda already has one, but it’s a PC app.
But dumping the macro-function, an OS-X requirement, was the stupidest move Apple made, for me at least.
Can’t even do a Word macro. (Word for OS-X has to be macro free.)
But I’m back to where I was. 4896 is my desktop picture, and I fire up everything from my dock.
My OS-X is Tiger (10.4), and anything I replace with has to be able to run 10.4 as an operating system.
Apple’s newest rigs can run any OS ya want; even Windoze. 10.4 would be a sub-system of the newest OS-X. “Which operating system?” a prompt asks.
10.4 so I have the Classic-Mode. (Everything I do was done with Appleworks-5; like this here.)
And the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth is over, I guess.
Linda’s PC is at least back to normal; and she was able to find her “bookmarks” files.
But all kinds of hoops had to be negotiated, and more are to come.
“A real pain!” she said. (Took the whole day.)

“Linda” is my wife of 40+ years. Her final job was as a computer-programmer. She has a Dell laptop PC. (I have an Apple Macintosh. —The whole import of this post is to get my siblings nattering. They all use PCs, so my MAC is of course inferior.) (Like me she’s retired, but she works part-time at the West Bloomfield [where we live] post-office.)

“OS-X” (operating-system 10) is the current Apple operating-system for operating Apple personal-computers.

“Shortcuts” are icons that fire up a software application. In OS-X they are resident in the “dock.” (Icons for other software applications can be added to the dock.)

The Pennsylvania Railroad’s “GG1” electric locomotive was the most successful and beautiful railroad locomotive of all time. I saw many in the early ‘60s as a teenager living in northern Delaware. #4896 was a GG1 I saw many times, and went through once; but was only able to photograph once. I have that photo as my computer desktop “wallpaper.”

“Browser bookmarks” are saved web-addresses.

“FireFox,” Microsoft “Internet-Explorer” and Apple “Safari” are all Internet browsers.

“Windoze” is of course Microsoft “Windows;” a put-down common to MAC users. “QuickTime” is the Apple media player.

“Apps” equals computer software applications.

“9.2” was the Apple operating-system that preceded OS-X. It was what I used for years; although it was preceded by 8.0 and 8.5. (9.2 was quite similar.)

The “macro-function” is recorded functions (e.g. typing) triggered by the Command-key with another.

“Do yaz remember that, Boobie? Sounds like ya might have a memory problem. Maybe ya should have that checked. Maybe yaz need Arigent®” is a copy/pasteable file I have to respond to my macho, blowhard brother-in-Boston, who seems to have failing memory, yet badmouths how much I have to use the bathroom (which isn’t that much). —“Arigent®” is a misspelling of Aricept®. (My brother misspelled Avodart® as “Avatar.”)

“Word” is Microsoft’s word-processor application (Appleworks the Apple competitor). —I prefer Appleworks over Word because Word has too many hot-keys that punish mistypes — common to a stroke-survivor (I had a stroke October 26, 1993). That’s despite Word being the most successful word-processor.