A Computer Steals My Life

I bought my dad a laptop for his 80th birthday. He virtually never used it, so I bought him a tablet and he gave me the laptop back. He likes the tablet, it's easy to use though he's still getting to grips with the concept of wifi, but he likes using it to watch youtube videos and research things via Google. So far so good.

I was going to sell the laptop but the battery was dead, which means I can't really sell it. A new battery will cost £20 - £40 and I could maybe get £50-£60 for the laptop. Then I thought I only use laptops plugged in , so I could make use of it, then I thought get my guitar interface and keyboard and this could be the studio. It's a 64 bit operating system, and was thinking it looked slightly strange. It was because it's Windows 8.1 . So I thought simple, just upgrade the Windows 10 then it's the same as my desktop and other laptop. No problem.

That was about twelve hours ago and I am still trying to upgrade to Windows 10 and it keeps getting into a loop searching for updates. There is nothing worse than something looping when you cannot break the loop. This is similar to the incident in March with an unexpectedly lengthy update.

I am still attempting to do this upgrade, and each try takes a long time. I have nearly written a few songs while this has been going on, but as the laptop is going to be my recorder they have flown off into the ether. I was playing along with songs on the radio including "Isis" by Bob Dylan, then sat and played the guitar solo from Thin Lizzy's "Emerald" and still I came nowhere near having a recorder.

So we have just passed midnight and slipped into the Bank Holiday Monday and the upgrade is going along with no sense of urgency whatsoever and I am hoping for success but feel that I will hit another brick wall. It is now of the "Checking For Updates" sequence and this is where it keeps failing although I have taken precautions to try and circumvent this situation.

Well Windows 10 decided to do an upgrade on another laptop , it started about 10:30 last night and went on with that ominous warning "Do Not Switch Off Your Computer" while staying for a very long time on 0% Complete.. The thing is it started progressing every now and then with several restarts before finally finishing at 1:30 this morning. I actually wanted to go to bed, but that was three hours of my life gone and when it's finally finished what has changed? ..... Nothing!!

Then it did it again tonight though this time it was five minutes, which was a slight blessing.This put me in mind of Eddie Izzard's upgrade routine, which I will share with you before I go to bed.

Things should just work. I always say that if Washing Machines and Cookers were like computers we would never cook or wash anything, though Eddie Izzard nails it.

I started on a mainframe in 1980 and in 1990 was working on a VAX with 4Mb of memory, that would store four minutes of music at basic compression today.

My Google Pixel 2XL phone has 64 Gb of memory and storage and is reasonably quick but computers , despite their huge processing power, always seem to have a reason to run slowly. In forty years since I really started working with computers power has improved unbelievably , but speed seems to always lag when you really need it.

Even my Kindle Fire runs very slow at times requiring a restart.

C’est La Vie..