Jaye Marie and Anita Dawes

For a start, they make me feel even more stupid than I actually am. (I have conducted significant research into this, and know this to be true. For no one could be as stupid as I feel when faced with all their shenanigans)

Since the arrival of all this nonsense about Windows 10, my computer has been doing some really strange things and I’m not convinced it’s just a coincidence. Weird stalling at first, followed by mild confusion (not mine, yet)

Then the buffering started.

Over the weeks, I have devised a method of dealing with these problems. From changing websites, and sometimes this works, as particular sites seem to suffer with these problems more than others. To switching off the internet and playing solitaire for a while.

See how resourceful I am?

Yesterday was bad. The buffering seemed to go on forever, no matter what I did. Even the CTRL+ALT +DELETE trick refused to work. Nothing responded to my delicate touch, so I decided to switch the blessed thing off at the mains.

What followed was surreal.

I turned everything off at the mains and waited. Nothing happened. That annoying little blue circle continued to circle. I stared at it, unsure of what was happening.

Minutes passed and still nothing happened.

The computer had to be possessed by the devil and I finally had proof.

My brain must have had second thoughts about this, for it started to look for the real reason. The relief when I discovered I had switched off the wrong plug was palpable. I may not be insane after all, just stupid.

Switching it off (for real this time) didn’t work either. I had visions of carting the PC off to the repair shop, and all the inconvenience and expense. The nightmare was getting worse by the minute. I ended up doing all my routine tasks on my laptop, while running a systems check on the PC. After many false clues and failed procedures, it turned out I had far too many things happening at start up. Not that I fully understood what this meant. I had to indicate which ones to turn off from the start menu. I hesitated. Was this a good idea?

I have done some stupid things like this before, and learned the hard way to never do anything I didn’t fully understand. So I tentatively deleted one or two and tried again. No change. Again with the same message.

I was getting desperate by this time, so took a leap of faith and deleted them all. After a restart, the PC worked quicker than it had in ages and my sanity was restored.

But not for long. Soon the buffering returned and my sanity turned tail and left the building.

For two days I tried to find the answer. If it hadn’t been for the laptop, I would have had to take the damned thing back to the shop. Instead, I googled the problem and found a helpful help screen for Firefox. They suggested several reasons for my dilemma, so I systematically tried them all. It was the second one that worked, something about an unresponsive (or broken) plug-in.

Still not sure what this was all about, or what went wrong, but (fingers crossed) everything seems to be working well at the moment…