Pillings Lock Marina 2010#4

Tuesday 23rd February and, yet again, it’s snowing. Admittedly we have been shopping and it’s now 4.15 pm, but it’s still snowing.

Now, you will be pleased to discover that I have now, successfully compiled my recipe book. Not only that, the darned thing actually runs, well, it does on my laptop. Hopefully it will also run on yours. I shall be bringing copies of same to the family soiree in March, for anyone who wants a copy.

The problem with MS Word has finally gone away, well, almost. This is because, by taking Sandra’s advice, I completely uninstalled MS Office 2003 and installed MS Office 2007 Home and Student. This came at half price when I purchased the laptop from Comet and it only has four programmes on it but, since we rarely use the others anyway, we’ll plod along with these.

I say, ‘well, almost’ because, whilst I’m sitting here typing in Word 7 the cursor is unable to keep up with me, and I’m not the fastest picker and pecker on the planet. I have also, at Sandra’s behest, carried out a defrag and uninstalled a couple of other programmes, so the machine should now run a little faster, I hope!!

On Thursday, although I hadn’t intended doing so this time around, I’m going down to Harlow to enjoy the jamming session at the Purple Emperor. To hell with the expense I say!

Friday 26th February and a good time was had by all last night at the Emperor. Although it is only a jamming session, they do get some really good musicians and singers there. Of course, lucky old me, I don’t need to put my hands in my pockets, because the art of barter is not yet dead in the good old UK. My dear brother and his friend Steve do a certain amount of work for Martin, the licensee of said watering hole and, in exchange they receive a card with a list of how many drinks they have earned. Steve is genuinely very pleased with this arrangement because, instead of receiving £20 for a small job, he’ll have 10 pints added to the list, which amounts to about £30. So, many quids in!

Now, about my ongoing problems with Word and such. On the very good advice from Sandra I decided to uninstall MS Office Professional 2003 and install MS Office Home and Student 2007. I then left the laptop alone until the following morning, when I decided I needed to send an email to a contact in the USA, which was when I spotted my deliberate mistake of the day before. Of course, Sandra wasn’t to know this, but H&S does not include Outlook! Ooops!

So, there I was with no way of sending emails. Not only that, but all my contacts had been eliminated with the programme. Of course, I tried to reinstall 2003 but, for some unfathomable reason, my lovely new laptop would not recognise the Product Key.

After much faffing about I decided to try a Restore and, to my surprise, Windows 7 actually lists all the things that have been changed over a period of time. Unlike XP it gives date and operation, in my case the uninstalling of 2003. Whoopee! I thought, and set to with a restore to that point.

After quite some time, or so it appeared, everything went back to that point, even to the Outlook icon appearing at the bottom of the screen.

My joy was short-lived however, because the machine then had to go through the full installation of 2003, which was when a particular file seemed to become unavailable, stopping the installation process.

By this time I was almost tearing my hair out and sat back to ponder my options. Naturally I carried out a search for the missing file but, as you will have no doubt guessed, the wretched thing was nowhere to be found. So, all I could do was to stop the install.

By this time of course, the CD for 2003 was now in the drive whilst I was hunting for the lost file, which was just as well because, all of a sudden up came a screen asking if I now wanted to install 2003 or repair it. Oh yes! Bring it on! Let’s do a repair, please!

Luckily for me this process actually worked. The only downside came when I wanted to compose an email. My email text editor is Word, and Outlook is well aware of that fact. Sadly this dumb programme couldn’t find it, and so it reverted to the inbuilt editor. This is OK, but it does mean I get the same nag screen up advising me that Word is not installed on this computer.

The final upshot of all this messing around, was for me to purchase Outlook 2007 whilst I was in Harlow, followed by the final removal of 2003 and the installation of Home and Student along with Outlook 2007. I have followed all this with a good clean out of superfluous programmes and the Registry, all of which seems to have done the trick. The only bug that still seems evident is the inability of Word to keep up with my picking and pecking. It is also a wee bit hesitant about complying with my request for a line break. I tap the return and the cursor simply disappears for a couple of seconds.
Not to worry though, tomorrow is another day and the weekend is upon us again.

Saturday 27th February and, at 5.20pm, it is now raining.

We did a spot of shopping this morning, followed by a visit to the Chandlery at Shardlow for some leak stopper for the windows.

I am still not happy about the way this Office 7 and Outlook 7 are behaving. With Word the cursor still seems to be having a hard time keeping up with my typing. A string of 3 or 4 words will suddenly appear on the document, when I’m expecting all the letters to flow together.

As for Outlook, well, needless to say, having installed it over the previous version, I think I am entitled to expect it to at least send and receive my messages. Nope! Just like in previous situations of a similar nature, I now find it impossible to send and receive through this programme, despite finding that the settings are correct.

I am all but convinced that I have a serious bug in the system. Fortunately I have a complete backup on my external hard drive and so, sometime tomorrow or Monday, I shall attempt a return to an earlier time when all was running smoothly.

Sunday 28th February and I am still suffering from Outlook 7 which will not send my messages. I had intended to restore an earlier backup, which would have sent me back to Office 2003 but, although Word is not perfect in that it is still not fast enough to keep up with my typing, I think I will email Three, who are my service providers, and see what they have to say. Meanwhile I can go online to Absolute Email, which is where my email address is hosted, and send/receive from there.
You see, good people, I have had similar problems with Three/Outlook in the past, one of which was being unable to send/receive because the stupid morons had changed the send/receive parameters without informing their customers of the fact. Lovely people aren’t they?

Same day at 10.15 am. I have been onto the Three site in an attempt to set this Outlook up properly so that it will send. Naturally, no serious help was forthcoming. In desperation I sent them a message asking them to get back to me asap. I received an acknowledgement message and was told that they would contact me within the next 5 to 10 days. How wonderful is that for Customer Service.

All is not lost though, because Windows 2007 has a wonderful email programme called Windows Live. It took no time at all to set it up to send and receive emails at my Shiralee address. For some reason though, it does not like doing the same for Yahoo accounts. But that is of little consequence because I rarely use it anyway.

So, that’s sorted then, at least until I hear from Three, which could be never, knowing how totally unreliable they can be.

Tuesday 2nd March and we awoke to a really heavy, freezing fog but, at 08.45, the fog is clearing and it looks like it could be a bright and sunny day.

As you are aware by now, I am still having problems with Outlook 2007 and so, instead I am using Windows Live Mail, which has no problems whatsoever in sending and receiving my emails.

I contacted my hosting company, who are Absolute Email and they came back with a bunch of things I could try to get Outlook sending mail, none of which work. They suggested in their latest message that 99 % of problems are usually cured by following these instructions, so I must be that other 1%, because I am still no nearer to getting any sense out of this thing.

Still, Live Mail is doing the job and I can still refer back to Outlook should I need any info from the emails stored there.

I am still not happy with Office 2007 though; word is still really slow; and one thing I have noticed, simply because I do quite a lot of it, is that it isn’t possible to copy and paste over an existing document, because, when I do I am then unable to save what I have done. This means that, every time I want to carry out this operation, I have to open a separate document, which takes an age. It is really frustrating.

I am now seriously considering loading a previous backup, which would take the laptop back to a time when I was successfully running Office 2003. In that way I would have the old Word, which is so much faster, along with Outlook 2003, which was happy sending and receiving with the proper settings. Knowing my luck though, the whole thing will be a complete disaster.

Honestly, I am at a loss as to what to do here. I suppose I could back up what I have at the moment, then load the earlier back up and, if that doesn’t do the trick, re-load the new backup.

12.30 the same day.
I have just checked the previous backup and, as far as I can tell, although it certainly looks to be big enough, I am not sure that it will completely return my laptop to the previous time. It’s a question of ‘will it actually recover the programmes I had on it before I ran into all this trouble’.

You see, Windows 7 also includes a utility that provides a mirror image of the computer called a ‘system image’, and this is not what I did the last time I backed up, so I don’t know what restoring the previous backup will do. Oh boy!

It seems that I have spent £100 on Outlook 7 and can’t use it and, because my original 2003 disk now appears to be corrupted, I can’t get the Outlook 2003 back. Again, Oh boy!

I am, as our cousins across the pond would say, between a rock and a hard place.

Wednesday 3rd February at 06.50 and I have a Doctor’s appointment at 07.55, so I don’t have a lot of time to mention this.

Anyway, yesterday afternoon, much to my surprise, I received a telephone from Three. Unfortunately, in a pique of anger because I thought this was a certain Asian gentleman who had incorrectly called me last week about another matter, I closed the phone until, when Wifey asked who it was and reminded me I was expecting them to call! Duh!

I immediately picked the phone up again and, as luck would have it, he was still there. And, lo and behold, a miracle was worked in this day in the year of Our Lord 2010. Having explained the situation he then took me through the whole procedure of setting up my email in Outlook 2007. Whoopee! I can now send and receive.

Now, as you all know, I am not one to complain but, I now find that, although Word 2003 can follow my cursor, it still doesn’t always do as I say. For example, just a few seconds ago, when I tried to embolden today’s date, the cursor highlighted the first letter and stopped. The result of this was, when I tried again it deleted that first letter. Also, if I try to open a document with a simple double click, Word is unable to do so, and so I have to first open Word, and then open the document I want. I do think though, that this is due to the fact that I have both versions of Word installed.

It really would be good if I could uninstall Word 2007, but that is not possible as it would be necessary to uninstall the whole Office 2007 to achieve this and I really do need to keep Outlook 2007. Yaveh! That rock and hard place are still there I’m afraid.

So, as a final (W)word on the subject, any constructive suggestions from you, my good friends, would be much appreciated.

We paid a visit to our local kennels yesterday and were both most surprised at the size of the place. It is huge and has enough space to accommodate dogs from local Police Forces and other Government outfits. Also, where the cost per night at the kennels at Tring was £20, it is only £10.50.

All for this morning, gotta get herself out of bed to take me to the car and to Quorn for my appointment. Looks like a late brekky for both of us today. In case you are wondering, it is rather frosty out there and I do not have full use of my legs at present. It is therefore necessary for Wifey to accompany on these dodgy mornings. Mind you, if I were to fall over, I would certainly have my knees attended to tout de suit.

OK. As I’m sure you’ve now had just about enough of my woes with this laptop, I’m now going to try posting this blog.

Until next time, luv and stuff from Dave, Sheila and our much maligned pooch.