Frying My Computer

My computer (which I am typing on) is in the process of dying on me.  I go through a computer about every two years.  I just fry them up.  I did when I worked outside the home too.  My employer had to replace them often.  They said I typed too fast, ha ha.  There would literally be a burning smell coming from my computer and they'd know to look into ordering me a new one.

My husband bought me a laptop last week which I have sitting in a closet - not using yet.  The thought of transferring what I need (photos, music, budget, passwords, etc.) to the new laptop has been daunting.  I love computers. I know my way around the computer (don't know a thing about electronics in general - show me component video cables and I wouldn't know what to do) but with so many photos and videos to go through to see what I want to transfer and what I want to put on disk, I put off my new laptop and hope my desktop PC holds out a little longer for me.  Everything I NEED is on my desktop PC.  I need to get it to my laptop and save the rest off my PC.  A second external hard drive might be what I need...oh, hubby...

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Who uses a tablet PC?

Who uses a tablet PC?  My oldest is starting to make a little noise about having one but I don't know a Eee Pad Asus from a hole in my head.  Desktops and laptops?  Yup, I can find my way around those.  I am usually up on technology but I guess with money so tight the last couple years, haven't wanted to torture myself by looking around.  Is a tablet PC just like a computer?  Does it require any extra expense to run every month?  What are the pros and cons?

I figure she'll have to babysit for quite awhile to save up for one if she's expecting to have one.

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Spammed the Friend of the Court

I just spammed the Friend of the Court (and the ex).  Oops.

My Yahoo mail was hacked yesterday.  Emails were sent to everybody in the my address book with a link.  These emails didn't show up in my sent mail though (?).  Weird.  The ex got three of them (she let me know, asking me if my computer had a virus).  I'm not sure how many the Friend of Court received, but I know for sure they received at least one because I got a vacation automatic reply from the person it was sent to (oops).

I changed my Yahoo password and it seems to be fixed now.  Thankfully!

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Treating Kids Differently

Does the ex show favoritism for one of your stepchildren over another?  I sometimes wonder about mine but I've never outright asked the kids because I sure wouldn't want to point it out or accuse without knowing for sure.  Here's why I wonder...

For Christmas, it seems like my stepson gets hugely expensive gifts and my stepdaughter doesn't.  This past Christmas, my stepson got a laptop and my stepdaughter got CD's and DVD's she said.  We were wanting to look at netbooks or laptops for my stepdaughter for graduation but now I wish we'd had the money to do it this year instead of waiting for next year.  Last year, he got an expensive guitar and she got...CD's and DVD's she said. 

In terms of discipline, my stepson has always skated with no discipline over some pretty bad behavior over the years while my stepdaughter gets grounded for a month at a time.  He also cusses like a sailor (while she doesn't).  She's the honors student and he's the one who almost failed every year of junior high. 

I really hope that my stepdaughter doesn't feel singled out or slighted at all. 

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Ex Allows Stepdaughter to Use Gift - Two Years Later

You'll never believe this...the ex allowed my stepdaughter to load her Kodak digital camera's software onto a computer so she can download pictures from it (two years after we bought it for her). Wasn't that nice of her?

Well, let me backtrack a little bit. She downloaded the software somewhere but the email address my stepdaughter used to send us a couple of pictures from that software was her grandparents' email address. So, I don't know if she did it from home or her grandparents house.

The kids told us that the ex is computer illiterate (nevermind that she's worked for a big city attorney for 20 years on computers)...yeah, you believe that one too? She believes that any software loaded on a computer is going to mess it up. That's what she says anyway. When she's tried to load virus software on the system (that we recommended and used ourselves with no problem), she claims it crashed her computer somehow and blamed us. I guess the software that came with my stepdaughter's digital camera was suspect because WE bought it for her (nevermind that it hadn't been opened by anyone by my stepdaughter). We're out to get her, don't ya know?

Seems to me the ex is pretending not to have anything but the most basic computer skills (how can you NOT have computer skills when you've worked for a big city attorney for two decades?) as a way to restrict contact between the kids and us with emails, facebook, myspace, exchanging pictures, etc. No big surprise. I'm just wondering if the kids finally caught on and that is why she allowed the software to finally be used that came with the camera (up until now, my stepdaughter would bring me her camera once a year and I'd download all the pics off of it and email every single one of them to her so she'd have them).

If the ex has so many computer problems she either needs to take a class and educate herself (can't imagine not being computer literate with children in the house) or have a company provide support like orange county computer services to ensure the computer systems used remain working in the way they're designed to do.

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Protect Your Communication With Ex

About a week ago, I wrote about the importance of keeping good records when it comes to our written communication with my husband's ex. It's always been a must with us, unfortunately. It would be nice to trust the other parent to do what they say they will and be fair in return, but we can't all live in fairyland now can we?

I have an external hard drive that backs up my computer with a touch of one button. It's awesome! I used to spend hours transferring things to 3-1/2" disks (remember those?) and then onto CD's. Now I just hit one button and I'm done ensuring that any correspondence that has occurred between the two homes is backed up for future reference.

Not only does it back up all the mess that is the ex, but I back up all my family videos and pictures at the same time so I never have to worry about my computer crashing and destroying data on me. Pictures and videos of my children are too precious to risk losing!

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Keeping Good Records

If you're like us, you realized early on that it is very important to keep good records of correspondence between you and the ex and perhaps a journal of things that don't leave their own paper trail. I have many bankers boxes in storage full of correspondence dealing with the ex from the first 11 years. (Imagine the bonfire we'll have after the kids turn 18!) We usually recycle all paper products but I can't imagine what the people at the recycle center would think if they read that!) For the past three years, rather than bombard my storage area with even more paperwork, I've kept most everything I could electronically with back ups. I see no reason to continue to kill trees to protect ourselves from the ex.

I have to ensure that I have a good computer system (and back-up) to hold everything. I started with disks but now I keep a stand alone back-up unit that backs up with the touch of a button. Love it!

I'm not too bad on the computer. I know my way around pretty well so this is easy enough for me. If I had to venture into the technical or mechanical side of computers, I'd call on somebody like orange county computer support because I'd have no clue.

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Memory for Electronics

I take so many pictures and videos of my children that I overtaxed the memory on my laptop. My computer kept shutting down every time I tried to turn the individual videos into one family video. I ended up with a back-up system that holds all my photos and videos for me.

If you are looking for PC or Mac memory, The Memory Suppliers has a "memory finder" so you can find the memory that fits your computer system. They also supply memory for cameras, cell phones, mp3 players and PDA's.

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Memory Down to 23%

My computer memory hovers around 23%. With all the photos and videos I take, this has me worried. It also makes it impossible for me to transfer my family videos onto a DVD because without enough memory (like now), it won't let me. How aggravating. I can clear up a lot of memory if I can transfer video over to DVD but I can't do that without more memory. It starts to transfer it and then shuts down about a quarter of the way through. ARGH! What a Catch-22.

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Black Box Network Services

Black Box Network Services offers voice and data networking for business, government, educational institutions, home offices and more. If you are in need of furniture, converters, networking, servers, cables such as the CAT5e, etc., they have been in business for more than 30 years so you know you can depend on them. Tech support is on call 24/7. They are there when you need them. They are THE leader in their industry.

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Computer Families

Does your family have a computer? I wonder how many have more than one? We do, but only one of them is connected to the Internet (mine). My husband has an inexpensive, refurbished desktop for his music writing and recording. My son has an old desktop of mine that barely struggles along because it is ancient. The memory is overloaded with all of the programs that I used to run on it so I need to clean it up or buy more memory so he can use it for his computer games. My oldest daughter has an old work computer that used to be set up at our old house but she knocked into it, which caused the CD/DVD drive to stop working somehow. Eventually we'll get these dinosaurs up and running for the kids to use for their computer games but that's it. I think it is important that they know their way around a computer, but they will never have Internet access in their rooms. I don't think it's safe.

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Love the Laptop

I love my laptop. I love that I can take it with me anywhere in or out of the house to use it when I need to. What I don't love about it is that I don't have enough memory for all of the pictures and videos that I take. What it needs is more laptop memory but I didn't know how to figure out which one I needed until finding MemoryStore.com. They have an online tool to help you figure out your memory configuration. Now I can figure it out on my own quickly.

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