Everyday Randomness

Wow, what a long day this has been.  After fighting with Hubby’s computer for a few hours I managed to get it working properly again without losing any data.

The short story is that the power randomly blinked on and off 3 times this morning.  Luckily after the first time the computers stayed off until I woke up.  Then I only turned Hubby’s pc on since I was working from it.  I was in the middle of some data entry work when the power flipped again.  It stayed off for a good 15 minutes, and when it came back on the pc wasn’t so lucky.

Windows would load up in safe mode, but that’s as far as I could get.  I tried a system restore with no luck, so I moved on to a Windows repair.  That didn’t work either.  I had absolutely no way to backup the data on the drive without losing the one very important email I had just downloaded a couple hours earlier, so I had to manually install a second copy of Windows on the drive on the same partition (I don’t have enough free space for another partition), replace the files that were screwed, and delete the extra copy of Windows.

After a few hours of messing with it all was well, and I headed off to print the one very important return shipping invoice I’d been freaking out over, but my very cheap and finicky little $20 (0n sale) Deskjet 3520 didn’t want to cooperate at all.  I reinstalled the driver 4 times before I got fed up with it and decided to give it a good boot with my size 8 across the room.  I reached down to pull out the usb cord only to realize it wasn’t connected.  I turned the printer around and found that the internals of the printer port were completely missing!

Well, that explains what that metal crunching sound I heard last time I used it was.  I got the one sheet I needed printed right before I heard the crunching sound, and I haven’t messed with it again.  I’m tired of cheap little deskjet printers that constantly break on me.  I swear I go through about 10 of them a year.

I know I swore I wouldn’t be investing in another inkjet since I’m ready to make the leap to a laser printer, but laser just wasn’t in my budget this week.  Honestly I thought I was going to have to get either a cheap all-in-one or a half way decent plain inkjet, but I got lucky.  I had a Staples coupon for 20% off, and they had one of the all-in-one’s I’ve been checking out on sale for $99.  I grabbed the Canon Pixma MP530.

It might not be the best all-in-one out there, but it’s good enough for me.  The only downside is that it’s lacking media card slots, but I prefer editing my photos in Paint Shop Pro most of the time before printing them out.  Overall I think I’ll be happy with this one.  I’ll give a full review once I’ve had a chance to play with all the features…and of course read that huge manual that tells me how to use everything.  At least I got my shipping label printed!