Bloody computers!

Not that anyone else will be interested, but it helps to get it off my chest.

We were having big, big computer problems, too many and too complicated to go into. Spend a lot of time checking for viruses and other nasties. All the protective & diagnostic systems say there's no problem.

Oh yes there is.

The usual waiting on hold for an hour while Etisalat's technical help people were "dealing with other customers". Nevertheless "your call is important to us"... obviously not important enough for them to employ enough people to deal with the calls though.

Eventually get a person on the line, who eventually gives the diagnosis that "it must be a problem with your computer".

Great.

Debate whether to call 'experts' in to find and fix the problem. Well, debate for a couple of seconds and dismiss the idea as very stupid. From experience I have less than no faith in the ability of computer/IT 'experts' to even begin to understand what they're doing. At great expense to the customer.

The alternative seems quicker, better, more cost-effective. Bin the bloody thing and buy a new one.

Decision made.

Buy a new one, the brain that is, and are surprised to find it comes with new keyboard, new webcam, new headset, new speakers. Nothing wrong with the existing ones but it's always nice to have new toys.

Mrs Seabee is much more technically-minded than me, and has much more patience - I think machines should simply work as they're supposed to, do what I bought them to do, at all times. I don't have any desire or interest in how they work or in the technical stuff. I lose interest in less than a minute to be honest.

Mrs Seabee starts to install the various bits & pieces. Sits for hours while little arrows fly into little bins, or little green lines gradually fill an empty panel. At the end of it messages along the lines of "The installation was unsuccessful" appeared with monotonous regularity.

Although we were assured every 30 seconds or so that our call "is important to us", waited for a long, long time while the tech. people were "dealing with other customers".

That happened half a dozen times through the evening, but each time the tech. people - when they eventually took the call - talked a patient Mrs Seabee through it, with far too much trial and error to change my opinion of 'experts', and she eventually got the basic stuff loaded.

We now have internet connection, e-mail, Messenger. Norton and other protection is in place. Still a lot to do, a lot to install, a lot of fine-tuning to go through but at least I have the basics to play with.

Mind you, there seem to be a lot of nasties about. Since 3.10 this afternoon, and it's now 6.25, Norton has told me it's blocked high-risk attacks 39 times.

I have MSRPC SrvSvc NetApi Buffer overflow (2), NetBios MspnPQueryResConflist BO, MS RPC Malicious LSASS DS Request BO (1) and MS ASNI something-or-other all trying to get into my computer every few minutes.

I'm going to shut down now and hope they've gone away by the time I come back to it.