So much for that
It was meant to be a quiet day.
Then Herself asked me to look something up on her laptop.
I confess I am not enamored of her laptop. It’s a [an?] HP which I had problems with when we first bought it. I discovered that HP don’t really like Liinux and I had to tweak all sorts of things just to get it connected to the Interwebs. Even now it only connects on the lower slower band,
Anyhows I fired it up and it started doing strange things. Launch a programme and it just sits there pretending it’s doing something when in fact it isn’t. I tried various geeky fixes but nothing worked properly.
I decided it was time for something drastic. Time in fact to wipe Linux and install the latest version which only came out a couple of days ago [I have been using it for the last month or so and it’s fine]. So that meant downloading the latest version as the one I use is the Beta one. Then I had to burn that onto a USB thingamajig.
I plugged the USB into her machine and fired it up. Grand. I told it to install. Then when I got to the bit about formatting I realised I hadn’t backed up her machine. Fuck! I removed the USB and rebooted.
I backed up her data [which mostly seems to be Farcebook sites] and her email. That took an age. And it’s only a precaution as her data won’t be touched anyway.
Back then to rebooting with the USB plugged in. That worked. The latest version of Mint is now installed. I rebooted and it came up with a rake of error messages. They disappeared before I could read them so that’s still a mystery.
At lest it’s working. One of the programmes that wasn’t working now is, which is something. And all her data is still in place.
Now I have to make her screen like it used to as her picture has vanished. She gets narky if there’s anything different. Apparently that makes the laptop unusable, though it’s still nearly that anyway – it’s abominably slow.
Then I have to clean all the pipe ash off her keyboard……
I’m now very wary of upgrading Mint. Even just the Update Manager updates. A couple of months ago I had a working system just how I wanted it and then, following “updates” I started getting various fails like “MintMENU has quit unexpectedly” – WTF??
A lot of time wasted rolling back and it’s still not right. At least the only “Update” now on offer is the “A new version of Update Manager is available”. No Thanks.
That is strange. I can’t remember when I started using Mint but it was a very long time ago [ten to fifteen years?]. I have always kept it up to date [and occasionally even jumped the gun and used a Beta version]. I have never had a problem. The only difficulty I ever had was loading Mint onto Herself’s HP which was not straightforward.
I suspect there is no such thing as a ‘quiet day’. If you are already busy and occupied the minor incidents and other calls on your time slide past to be dealt with later. If you are enjoying some quiet time these similar minor things become ‘panics’ requiring immediate attention.
Which reminds me…. I must cut the grass…..