Computer Health Update

Well, it's been an interesting week. Friends and relatives have rallied round and offered advice on my ailing pc.

The first question was - what specifications has it got? Obviously with a third-hand computer one has no idea, except 'very puny presumably'. One way to find this out is to pause the display screen whilst booting up and simply write it all down. A little tricky if your computer goes into off mode before getting to that stage of booting up. However, I tried pressing F1 to go into setup, and this seemed to bypass the problem. Great!

More advice was waiting in my emails - a download called Belarc Advisor will find out all that sort of stuff for you. A few minutes later and I had a list of my computer's vital statistics. Hmmmm, even I could see that the absence of any sort of virus protection needed to be sorted urgently. Help was at hand in the form of AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition, SpyBot Search and Destroy, A2 Anti-Malware and finally Sygate Personal Firewall. All free, just make sure you find the free version. Luckily, apart from a posse of tracking cookies, there didn't seem to be anything suspicious in the machine. I have I hope avoided all the viruses, trojans, malware and assorted other beasties.

But what was the actual problem? The suggestion was to run PC Medik, which says it 'repairs and boosts computer settings to fix hardware and software problems affecting it's performance' (their apostrophe). This didn't seem to make any difference. I found out a couple of things by googling 'my computer won't boot up', including removing all but the essential programmes which open up as the computer is starting up. Removing programmes is a little scary, but fortunately I had The Rough Guide to PCs and Windows to guide me. Still no difference, but emboldened by not actually breaking the thing, I ran Scandisc, which looks for problems on the hard disc. (Normally I do this by not switching off properly...) Fortunately it didn't find any. Next step - disc defragmentation. One assumes that the hard disc of a third-hand computer is in need of a little tidying up. This takes several hours of bleeping - except the poor thing got tired in the middle and crashed so thoroughly that I had to switch it off at the mains.

So back to the helpful emails, where the next suggestion was to try System Restore. This all seemed rather advanced computing to me, but really it's very easy. You just tell it to go back to a date before the problems started and restore the systems to what they were then. All the work you've done since that date is completely unaffected. Jolly clever, and it seems to have worked! So far, the computer has booted up normally several times. Whoopeedoo. (If only I could do something similar with my dodgy back - rewind time to the day before I decided I could angle-grind paving slabs like a navvy).

This has all been rather useful and empowering, and many thanks to my uncle Harry Hill and to Moseley Blogger for all the advice! I'm left with one nagging doubt though. AM I TURNING INTO A GEEK?

Normal service will be restored shortly.

Cov HOD

In between work trips to Yorkshire and the South-West, I managed to fit in Coventry Heritage Open Day, last weekend. Coventry was one of the best medieval cities in England till the middle years of the last century. Ironically it was its industrial prosperity, rather than entirely the blitz, which started the removal of the narrowest streets to facilitate the growing number of cars, source of the city's wealth. Obviously the blitz did huge damage which the planners would never have done (would they?), and there is a lot which is good about the modernist precincts which replaced the old streets. But apparently the work could be done remarkably quickly because Donald Gibson had had the plans in his back pocket since being appointed municipal architect just before the war. (See this for one version of the controversy, and this, an excellent site but perhaps a little too thorough for those not particularly involved in the city).

Anyway, armed with a booklet I set off to discover what was still left of old Coventry. Surprisingly, there are many gems still surviving - just, in the case of some.



St Mary's Guildhall is over 650 years old and was one of the apparently innumerable places in which Mary, Queen of Scots was imprisoned. It has a glorious roof which would be not out of place in a Somerset or Norfolk church.



Inside are several intriguing carvings, like this fork-bearded character.

The Council Chambers are a surprise: one imagines this forward-looking city to have a thoroughly modern, state of the art, council chamber. Instead there is dark wood, writhing in snakes and twined in vines.

What a venue for the discussion of bin rounds!

St John's Church is a tall narrow building overlooking a roundabout and overlooked by the backs of modern shopping centres. However, inside it is an impressive Perpendicular style medieval church with a rather varied history, including the reason for one popular phrase about the city.

Inside the church this curious little person clings to the walls, with a Green Man for company. They look down on the congregation as they have done for several centuries. What was in the minds of the people who carved these, and who commissioned their creation? A mystery that we will probably never fully solve, and probably the better for that.

PLEASE NOTE: there may be an interruption in postings to this blog. My computer, rescued from the threat of being skipped, is probably not long for this world. It took seven goes to get it started this evening, and the rest of the evening will be spent copying as much as I can of my work and photos on a memory stick in case it never starts again! The easy answer would be to go out and buy a new computer - or even order one online tonight - but did I ever go for the easy solution? I'm fairly determined to get a second-hand one, so I'm hoping that Complete Wasters will be able to help. But they are in Leicestershire, so it may take me a while to get it sorted.

God's own country...

Just got back from three days in Yorkshire, visiting organic gardening projects for work. I stayed in a campsite near the top of Baildon Moor overlooking much of West Yorkshire. A great spot on a fine evening.

It was an entertainingly odd campsite, populated by a vast menagerie of hens, bantams, ducks, geese and turkeys. We were treated to an accordion rendition every evening from a guy who lived in one of the static caravans, and in the morning what sounded like someone practising their scales, until I realised it was a cockerel.

But it was great to be reminded of the huge views you can get in Yorkshire. I drove up to Richmond one day, and on a clear day you can easily see the North York Moors on the right and the Dales on the left. Richmond particularly pleased me as I actually found somewhere which had some camping gaz in stock: it's the small but important things that count when you're camping, that's one of the things I like about it.

And I found a baker's in Bradford which makes excellent (let's make sure I get this right...) Curd Tarts.

Home

Well, this is where I live now.

Somehow, it isn't the little gritstone house in Yorkshire with a back garden sloping steeply up to a dry-stone wall...but it's not bad. Compared with the houses I looked at, it is really spacious and light.

I even have a conservatory! OK, it's a bay window... soon to be filled with heritage chillis along with my cactus collection. The flat is something of an advertisement for Ikea, for which I am almost as guilty as the landlord.

The other end of the living room...more plants...more books...

My slightly idiosyncratic computer console, you can imagine me sitting here right now. And a rather unused art table. This place is too 'nice' to be throwing paint around, so I planned to just use watercolours, not acrylics, and got a nice little table. But I never really got started, and now I've got used to doing a lot more photography and computer stuff. I expect the art will re-emerge at some point though.

The kitchen mid baking session. Looks like scones to me.

And the basement. Well, garage. Even the bikes have their own place now, even if they do have to share it with lots of camping gear, art equipment, a compost bin and lots of gardening stuff biding its time...