Computer Woes

.This is one of my newly favorite threads because I love the way looks so festive on this dark blue paper.

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I've had a virus on my work computer for the past week. The IT person and I tried everything to get rid of it. It was really only affecting my Internet usage (wacky windows popped up randomly and I was denied access to the pages I wanted to see). But, the cure - running Spybot and other virus detecting programs - was killing me - slowing my system down so badly, I could hardly work. I have zero tolerance for slow computers unfortunately.

So I was happy to see she had given me another computer yesterday. That's kind of a good news/bad news thing, isn't it? I was glad to be rid of the virus but setting things up again is time consuming. She was able to do most of it automatically, it wasn't so much me setting my preferences for this and that, so it really wasn't as painful as I'm making it out to be. Still.

Plus I'm learning VMWare because she's moving a lot of us to this - so we work in a virtual module and a host. The learning curve is pretty small and it will be good to know that if I ever get a virus again, I can quickly recover by working in the other module. (The VM and host share hardware but not software.)

On the home front, the 2 USB ports on my laptop have been funky for a while - like they are shorting out or something. Our IT person tells me they are part of the system board or motherboard or something so they aren't easily replaced. I'm still limping along but I can feel myself heading towards a new laptop. (Especially when I realized that Simon has had 2 laptops in the amount of time I've had one. Not fair!) (Not to mention he's had 3 cars in the time I've had 2, but I don't care about cars like I do computers!) I should probably give our Purchasing director a heads up now because we get really good deals from time to time that he can offer to employees.

I haven't looked online yet but I did check at a Radio Shack store for an adapter that turns a serial port into a USB port. It's not the long term answer but it's got to be better than this intermittent crap.

I'm open to other suggestions if anyone knows of anything I can do to save this laptop.

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I stopped by the craft show after work yesterday. I definitely sold some stuff. I don't have a count of what I started with but it looked like those little gift tags were selling well. And I'm pretty sure I unloaded some of those wholesale cards.

I almost forgot! I took this photo with my phone yesterday. Those are the wholesale cards on the right - see? - they are nice! The two little racks on the right of the table hold the gift tags I've mentioned. Out of range to the right is my black shutter with the framed art.

It's probably a little hard to tell but that table on those risers is just the perfect height. Right when I got there yesterday, I ran into a woman I used to volunteer with at the Ronald McDonald House so I got to witness how much easier it is for people to see my work when it's higher like that. (Thanks again Mom, for the help with the tablecloth - you rock!)

See what I mean about limited space? We don't have specified booths but it all works out. I had a chance to walk around a little bit - there is some nice stuff there - and more of it is handmade than I was remembering.

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