Time flies when you're having fun. Another week is gone by quickly. Donna continues her long bike rides with the Folks-on Spokes group. Long walks for me. We haven't been all that cold this season, but that looks like it's going to change over the next week or so. And we got a surprise visit from Steve & Susan yesterday and had a great dinner at Mikee's. (We all had gift certificates, so the choice was easy.) Ate too much, but enjoyed every bite of it. Told Weight Watchers to "stick it" and got all-you-can-eat grilled shrimp. It's only points, anyway.
Donna's decided to get a new computer, and she got a Windows 8.1 one. Hence the title of this week's post. For those of you unfamiliar with NMCI, it stands for Navy Marine Corps Intranet. In the name of security, it created a system that required a hacker to use. At one point before I retired, I was convinced that my sole purpose as a navy civil servant was to report the daily issues that I was having with my computer. It was so bad that people started buying their own computer and bring them to work & travel in order to get things done. Then I retired. I understand NextGen has taken its place.
Getting back to Donna's new computer, after a weekend of it trying to shut down we finally let the battery run down, took it back and exchanged it for a new one. (FWIW: when we did a "hard" shutdown, it would just restart & say it was shutting down.) During our first trip there, we'd learned that one of the ladies who worked on the Geek Squad had worked on NMCI. I politely informed her that I didn't have much patience, and NMCI took what little I had for IT away. Hence this week's title. So this was our second trip to the Best Guy/Geek Squad to get it fixed in a week. Plus we'd used all our 15GB/month of data just uploading updates and other software we wanted on the new computer, so we had them load all the updates on the new one.
So we get the new one home Monday evening with all the updates and within an hour, we got what I've nicked named "the purple screen of leave-me-on-and-check-back-tomorrow". It had taken an hour for us to get this new computer in the condition that took us a week with the previous one. After a couple of hours of me getting angrier & angrier with it, Donna went to bed and I contemplated how good it would feel to just take it outside, place it in the middle of the road & take our hammer to it.
About midnight I took a chance & tried to see if I could get task manager to come up and it did. Turns out a mistaken download of an unwanted software program (when we had tried to download Malwarebytes) had installed itself and was scanning the computer every time we restarted it. I disabled it in the Startup Menu, but the computer couldn't get past the unwanted program's report window. Tried to reset the program's setting, but I had to finally buy the program's license to get to the program's settings and set it not to run at boot up. Once that was settled, we got back to the purple "check me tomorrow" screen. It wasn't trying to shut down - all we got was that purple screen and some "bubbles" twirling around. Plugged it in and went to bed.
Woke up about 3:30 AM and decided to get up and check on it. There it was, the start screen. Decided it was fibbin' and did a restart. Surprised me that it worked, but it did. Took that opportunity to uninstall everything that we'd installed after loading our antivirus software and shut the computer off. And back to bed.
Got up early and turned it on. All seemed to be OK with it. We loaded Malwarebytes as planned and it's been fine every since. I've long believed and told people that Bill Gates made himself a billionaire selling us unfinished products that didn't work & about which he said they'd eventually fix, but never would. Apparently, that's a core value of Microsoft.
Stay warm. David
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