Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Eight hours of my life, gone forever


Dee bought me a new Dell laptop for my birthday and it arrived the other day. I installed Vista Home Premium Edition and last night I tried to make Office 2007 work. Specifically, I tried to make Outlook work with my ISP. Well, everything seemed to work out OK until it came down to the Outlook automatically querying the Comcast e-mail server for messages. I spent hours trying to tell Outlook to remember my network password. I removed Office 2007, twice, cleared the registry, three times, and I could not make Outlook remember my network password and automatically look for new e-mails. I thought that the problem was with the PST file I tried to migrate from my old computer and after a bunch of different attempts, hours of time on differnet websites looking for a solution, and some help from my friend Chris, I was able to remove the old PST file and assign a network password that Outlook now remembers. I learned a lot about Vista and Outlook 2007, but it never should have been this hard. While my good friend Lisa lost 15 minutes of her life catching up on Vanilla Ice, those eight hours I spent working through what should have been a simple evolution were filled with frustration. At least now, my new machine knows who it is and what it is supposed to do for me. As Deirdre once said to me when approaching a technical computer issues, "No machine is going to beat me!"

5 comments:

Lisa said...

Hey, listen! I'm still ticked about that 15 minutes. Fortunately, you can pretty much learn everything you need to know (and maybe more than you really need to know) about Vanilla Ice in 15 minutes. I'll slay everyone in Pop Culture Trivia Pursuit.

Either way, sorry to hear of your techie problems...which explained your blogging absence for a full day. Hope you're up and running smoothly.

Lisa

Big Johnny said...

Glad I sold my MSFT stock

Deirdre Honner said...

We don't own M$ either. Urrgggghhhh...

The Pritchard Family said...

That's exactly why I just purchased an Apple I-Mac!

Anonymous said...

Here's hoping this is the last problem you have with Vista. If issues continue call Dell and they will send you for free XP-lots of folks seem to be returning to XP