Grrr...

So, on this, my first day of regular posting, I am faced with a major problem. I suppose that this ought to be a learning experience, but, honestly, I am just really ticked off.

I'm getting married again at the end of the month, and I was trying to print out the text of the wedding invitations over the weekend. Everything was going smoothly as I printed off a mock-up of the text, and I even printed out a stencil I was going to use later in the process.

Unfortunately, as I went to print the finished product, I got an error on my computer that said that the ink cartridge was the wrong one for the printer... you know, the same ink cartridge it's been printing on for weeks... the same one that the printer had JUST PRINTED WITH!!!

So, I dinked around with the printer for over an hour, taking out the print cartridges, putting them back in, unplugging the printer from power, unplugging the printer from the computer, doing all of those things in concert... and.... nothing worked.

So, I gave up for the night. Sunday morning, I tried again, and, after much frou-frou and messing around with the damned thing, I finally got that error message to go away. But would the damned thing print? Oh, hell no.

No, now, it told me that there was no printer installed. Even though the computer had the printer set as the default printer, and even though no settings had changed, it refused to print, and INSISTED that there was no printer installed.

So, I went to the manufacturer's website and downloaded the drivers again (as my CD with the damned drivers was no where to be found... okay, well, I found the Mac disk, but could not find the Windows disk anywhere) and re-installed the drivers and tried to print again.

NOPE! Printer is still not installed, insisted the computer. So, I went and searched online for more possible solutions. While perusing the help database of the manufacturer's web site (and while my dear fiancee went and borrowed another printer to see if the printer itself was the problem), an ad popped up, and the next thing I know, I am being re-directed to another site, My computer then informed me that the computer might be at risk and vulnerable, and that I should click an official-looking balloon to find out if that was so.

I shut down the computer, hoping to avoid the hostageware from downloading to my computer. Reboot and... every web page I went to re-directed the browser to some spam site. Obviously, I had not booted down quickly enough.

I decided that I needed to do a system restore and see if that fixed both the hostageware and the printer issues.

Can you guess whether it worked? I'll spare you the suspense: no, it did not.

Now, my computrer informed me that no changes had occurred to my computer within a whole week (even though I had started using a different keyboard three days ago) and that system restore did not change anything.

Sigh. Okay. Try again from an earlier date, and....

NOPE. Same message. Try again from an even earlier date.

NOPE!!! Same message. Now, you and I both know that SOME changes had to have happened at some point in the last month, but my computer kept telling me that everything was the same. So, I saved all my e-mails and new files to my external hard drive and went to reset the computer back to factory defaults.

An aside here: in early April, I renewed my subscription to Trend Micro for their PC-cillin anti-virus software. Since then, I have had to reset the damned computer once already; this would be twice now.

Unfortunately, even THAT didn't work. At the end of the process, I got an error message that the reset had failed and the computer rebooted... except that it didn't actually reboot. No, instead, I got a black screen and another error message that there was some PBR file that the computer wanted to do something with, but couldn't, and, thus, the boot had failed and my only option was to hit CTRL-ALT-DEL to reboot. When I do that, I get the same black screen and error message.

So, now, I have exhausted my knowledge of how to fix this problem, so one of my friends who knows a ton more than I do about fixing computers is going to do it. Le sigh.

In the meantime, I still don't have the wedding invitations printed.