Friday, October 23, 2009

Lemon Laptop and sloppy filing by Yahoo

I've written various places about the troubles I've been having with my BRAND NEW (as of May 2009) Toshiba laptop.  IIRC, first there was the problem of the screen going black whenever I'd pick it up.  It would come back right away when you touched a key, but still, that isn't supposed to happen.  Then there was the fact that the cursor would jump all over the screen uncontrollably when I tried to use it in the car (with my hubby driving - I get a lot of writing and editing done on trips).  We took it to the certified Toshiba repair place (and none of this is their fault - they've been wonderful about trying to fix it) and the first time it went in, they replaced the touchpad and the hard drive.  In a brand-new computer, mind you!  The blacking out continued and there was some other problem that escapes me at the moment, so it went in for repair again and they replaced the mother board.  When I got it back that time, one USB port wouldn't work and recently, the right mouse key only works intermittently.  So we took it in again and found out that ALL Toshiba Satellite laptops of that model have been recalled and Toshiba will repair it at the factor.  Excuse me, folks at Toshiba, but there isn't a lot left to repair after you replace the mother board, the hard drive and the touch pad, is there???  *sigh*  I'd like to know at what point they plan to send me a new computer - maybe at THIS point.

Oh, as for the cursor problem - we got a different power converter for the car that goes straight from whatever power usually is to that same format (I don't remember if it's DC to DC or AC to AC - I can't keep them straight).  The old converter went from AC to DC (or the other way round???) and that worked for my old laptops but not for this new one for some reason.  The new one is a Vista machine - I don't know if that makes any difference.  My old one was an XP Pro.

We've had several Toshiba laptops - my hubby has one that's about eight years old and is so heavy it's hard to carry around, but it's still running - slowly compared to new ones, but running!  I use my laptops hard, carrying them all over the house, to art shows, on trips, etc.  They're meant to be mobile and I use them that way.  We've been pleased with our Toshiba computers up until this one.  And I love this new computer except for all the problems it's been giving me!  Hence my griping here.

As for sloppy filing by Yahoo - I keep files on my Yahoo mail account for emails concerning various of my projects (such as the Dancing Horse Farm Equine Art Show or books and stories I'm consulting with my beta readers about), special emails from close friends, emails that I've sent myself to note research I'm doing for stories or sculptures, etc.  Every so often, Yahoo will say I have more unread emails than show in the Inbox listing.  When I look down the list in the Inbox, I may find a bunch of spams have inserted themselves in the Inbox list.  Other times, I'll see one of the files highlighted and the extra "new" emails are there.  That happened this morning.  When I opened that file, imagine my shock when I saw a LOT of e's I'd DELETED had been stored in that file!  These are e's I'd read and didn't need, so I hit the "delete" key and expected them to go to the trash folder.  So I went through all my folders and found some of them in pristine condition, but the ones I haven't used very often had up to about 30 trash emails in them!  I have no idea how or why this happened, but if you file some of your emails on Yahoo, you'd better check your folders to see what's really there!

I wish I knew an easy way to save what's in those folders to my hard drive and get them off Yahoo.  I don't know how to do that except by opening every one and saving it as a Word document or something, and that would take an awfully long time with some of these files.  If anyone has suggestions, I'd love to  hear them!

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