Hang the Diet!

Saturday lunchtime, I took my bleary, scruffy Saturday self off to Milford to buy a few everyday basics (milk, coffee, bin bags …). There seemed to be a lot of traffic, so I followed it (out of curiosity)  down to the docks and found a food festival on Mackerel Quay. It turned out to be the Welsh heat of the British Street Food Awards. The place was absolutely heaving with people (and lots of dogs on leads!) but I found a (free) parking space easily enough. Having skipped breakfast (no coffee in the house!), my tummy was growling at all the delicious smells wafting around. Free entry. Oh yeah, hang the diet, let's eat!

With 15 or so stalls, including a beer tent, there was plenty to choose from. My first stop was for a vegetable Malay curry, sweet and fragrant with coconut rice. A sign for squid attracted me, but I went for their monkfish taco with a charred sweetcorn salsa and mojito dressing, which was superb. I finished my three course lunch with a very gooey brownie, which was described as chocolate and laver (the seaweed), but I couldn't detect any trace of the latter. It did contain pistachios, which I love, but I didn't like the extreme gooeyness.

I spent more time chatting than eating. There were deckchairs (including three giant ones facing the waterway, which the kids were loving to clamber onto and sit three abreast!) and benches in the centre of the stalls and it was a very relaxed atmosphere, despite the lack of sunshine. It's perfectly normal here to fall into conversation with complete strangers, and have other people join in. The general consensus was that the event should be held every year, or perhaps even have just local producers every month.

Yes, it really was that grey. I hung around for a bit, waiting for the doughnut stall to reopen. It's difficult to see on the photo, but there is a long queue. Their light, fluffy doughnuts were worth the wait, but they were having serious difficulty meeting demand.

Something I should have filmed was the rather surreal effect of disembodied masts slowly moving past the back of the stalls at the end of the quay, as yachts moved through the lock between the marina and the Haven. With the weather becoming increasingly drizzly, I decided to go, stopping to shop (coffee!) on the way home.

The Sunday was a little brighter, so I fetched a friend from Haverfordwest for a spontaneous spot of 'Sunday lunch'. I had a barley and bean 'risotto' (overpowering herbs!) while my friend had sausages in a bun (but what sausages, with onions and sauce, I was almost tempted myself!) and I treated myself to sweet chilli squid. We finished with a luscious ice cream and a cuppa back in the chaos of my place (so my friend can feel better about the state of her flat, because it's tidy compared to mine. It's all relative.) My cats proved, once again, that they are antisocial little furbags.

I could so easily have missed this event. I don't generally get the local papers, Facebook frequently doesn't bring up the local stuff I might be interested in, and I often only find out about things after the event. Overloaded with information, it's often only by looking for something specific that I catch what's on. I made a pact with myself to make an effort to get out to some more cheap or free and fun things to do. Which, I've a feeling, is something far easier said than done!

It had to happen ...

There's no good time for a computer system which is in daily use to go down. I'd been expecting mine to die for a while, and had been thinking long and hard about what I needed for the past couple of years. Bought in 2005, there was no doubt mine was extremely outdated. It had XP as its operating system, support for which was withdrawn a few years ago. It was a good operating system, but my PC didn't have the processor speed or RAM to cope with an upgrade, nor (I suspect) the internal space for new cards etc. so it became one of those 'if it's not broken, don't fix it' things. However, as versions of operating systems and the main Microsoft Office package moved on, it became increasingly difficult to maintain compatibility.  I bought a terabyte external hard drive a few years ago as backup, and then started using it as my main storage too, as the 145 GB hard drive seemed permanently full and the whole thing was getting slower and slower. Then my dear old PC started making some alarming noises (especially when Norton kicked in and hogged the processor). So I started looking seriously at what I would need by way of RAM, processor speed and storage, checking the requirements of the applications I rely on. At least a new computer with up-to-date apps would support more work potential for Plan B.
My stepson, who works in the industry, observed that it didn't much matter what I went for, as it would be so much better than what I had. Knowing that modern apps come with system requirements, I'm unconvinced.

As a friend who used to work in IT sales observed, it's a minefield out there, and this may be an understatement. Computer hardware and software are fast-moving beasts. When I started looking, Windows 7 was just moving to 8, and then almost in a blink of an eye to 8.1 with Office 13 the latest thing. Each upgrade required more RAM, more processor speed, more storage, and more of anything means more expensive too.

My Dad and I had been talking about getting a PC built to order, but I thought this might be an expensive way to go, and it seemed like it was necessary to know more about chipsets, graphics processors and internal gubbins than I could get my head around. I'd got to the point where I thought I probably needed a laptop to act as a backup system and provide a flexible, mobile solution (it's great having a smartphone, but I'm hardwired for a qwerty keyboard and preferably a mouse, and proper word processing capabilities at the very least),

And then, just as I was starting the running order for the Cardigan Belly Dance Festival a little over a fortnight away, and just as I had seen an email requesting changes to a book I'm editing, my old computer went FUT! Literally, with a bright flash from the back and a smell of scorched dust. And a lot of loud swearing.

I used my phone and a library computer (almost as slow and unreliable as my old one!) to do some searching and had several conversations with my Dad about requirements. I went into the local branch of a chain store which sells computers and had a browse around, gravitating immediately to a couple of laptops which turned out to be top end, though not gaming machines, with prices starting at £1500. Typical of me to go for the expensive options; even so, I was a bit shocked at the prices. So many advertisements with offers on laptops would lead you to believe you can get something really good for under £300. Yeah, right.

It's always a case of any two, but not all three, of fast, good or cheap. I needed one quickly, with a reasonably good specification in terms of RAM, processor and storage, and it soon became clear that in order to achieve the latter in particular, it would be rather more expensive than I had intended. The cheaper laptops were fine for social media and online shopping, but wouldn't support any productive work on documentation. Even the next level up, marketed for students, weren't really up to working with the full Office package. We excitedly explored a 2-in-1 Microsoft Surface Book, until it became clear that even the 13" screen with an i5 processor was approaching the £2000 mark, and even then, it would need a faster processor to run the Adobe Creative suite software which I'd intended learning into and exploring to take my digital art to the next level. We'd be looking at £2500 before adding the cost of software and other peripherals, like a wireless keyboard, new monitor, new printer - even the stylus didn't come with the machine, which seemed like a damned cheek for something so expensive.

In the end I chose a machine with 8 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, an Intel Core i5 DDR4/quadcore processor, with a clock speed of 1.60 GHz, but with a maximum 'turbo frequency' of 3.40 GHz. Just looking at the numbers, that didn't seem any faster than my old Intel Pentium 4 running at 3 GHz, except that it's not meaningful to compare processors like that. Used to a 19" monitor, I went for a 15.6" as the 13" seemed too small, even though I intend to find a way to plug my old monitor in. And like my trusty old workhorse, the new one is also a Dell.

As a not-very-techie-but (I think/hope) fairly competent user (#itsnotrocketscience!) moving from an old XP desktop to a Windows 10 laptop, I expected a steepish learning curve and to have to take time to get apps and other things set up and learn where everything is. The user interface is quite different, so I'm gradually fumbling my way around. The track/touch pad is the best I've used in my admittedly narrow experience of laptops and the keyboard isn't too bad, although the different layout and key spacing from my old one has me hitting hash instead of return a lot of the time and inadvertently putting caps lock on. Having my forearms resting on the front of the laptop while typing isn't ideal - I could do with a lower desk. It's really fast and the fan, when it comes on, is so quiet, compared to my old system. I plugged in my external hard drive and found to my immense relief that I could read and use the files immediately.

I've had it a week and the teething troubles are still outweighing the good bits. I'm permanently in a state of how does this work, what-does this mean, why isn't this working, what am I supposed to do? Grrr, aggravation, right from the start when registering the machine. Why do I have to select business or personal. It's both, why can't it be both, what's the difference? Much of the online help and feedback, which Dell and Microsoft invite, seems to go unanswered, or has answers which take three paragraphs to give no intelligible information and are applicable to a previous operating system.

Things have been somewhat erratic, Having watched something on YouTube, a few hours later, it wouldn't work. I can't remember the exact wording of the error message that came up, but it wasn't clear whether it was a problem with YouTube or the browser, or possibly something else. 'Try again later' didn't work and eventually I gave up and went to bed. It worked the next day.

Having set up the printer, everything apparently okay, I went to print, and the computer told me that the printer was offline. It wasn't. It was on, both in terms of power and on the WiFi network, and the computer could obviously see it because it queued the document. Switching various things off and on, retrying, etc, didn't do anything. I wondered if I needed drivers and went off to look, but found conflicting information. And lots of unanswered feedback and questions about whether Kodak printers were compatible with Windows 10. There was very little information and only one driver on the Kodak site, and something about drivers automatically loaded from the Windows end, which left me none the wiser. A couple of hours later, I jumped out of my skin as the printer started printing the page I'd sent. No dialogue from the computer. What the hell happened there?

The LCD screen seems to have a grey-blue colour cast and isn't reproducing colours at all accurately. I didn't really notice how bad it was until, fed up of trying to find a way to adjust brightness and contrast, I was looking at some photos and found that the colour reproduction was way off. Again, conflicting information - apparently the LCD screen on a laptop shouldn't need adjusting, but this looks like a colour profile issue. But instructions on colour management seem to be aimed at monitors as separate devices, So the suggestion is to plug in a monitor to test the LCD colour reproduction. I'd need a VGA-USB-C adapter and even the expensive Dell version doesn't include this laptop in the models with which the adapter is supposedly compatible, and I can't find any reason why. I might buy a cheaper one just to test it out, otherwise I can't think how I'm going to make any progress with this, short of taking it back to the shop ...

,,, which I'm very loath to do right now, as I'm in the middle of gathering all the music and dancer details for the show this weekend. I have the running order and playlists to do, as well as preparing my own mini workshop and notes for attendees, and finishing my choreography as well as preparing my costume and trying to find some time to rehearse. Some music tracks which played yesterday now don't play today on Groove Music (which was the app which popped up automatically to play tracks). Okay, so I'll play them with Windows Media Player. Nope, 'a problem occurred' and when I clicked the link to take me to the Windows help and support, I had half a dozen lines applicable to Windows 7, starting with 'Unfortunately, specific info about the error isn't currently available'. If not now, then when? And lots of forum posts wondering whether Windows Media Player works with some update or version (or something) of Windows 10. Which left me wondering how I could find out which version or update I had. Again, Windows support was no help, I found what I needed from How-To Geek. See, if they can do it, why can't you, Microsoft? #notrocketscience.

In the meantime, I thought maybe the tracks would play through iTunes and as I generally sync my iPod to ensure I have the show tracks backed up on there as well as on a USB stick, I tried downloading iTunes. And found that apparently it's not available for my laptop. According to Apple, this laptop should be capable for it, but Windows store only offers it for a different version of Windows 10. I managed to find my system information; my version is 15063, the one required is 16299, which is apparently a PC (as in desktop?) version. But again, there's no real information about how to get that build version, what it relates to. The link just takes you through to Windows 10, as if the choice between their Home, Pro, Education etc. editions is all there is. I have a lot of my music in iTunes format and some credit in the store. I've found a link to download build 16299 but nothing that helps me to know if it's safe to do so.

Returning to the Microsoft help and support, I put in the code from the Groove Music error message to find a thread dating back to Windows 7 in 2012 with exactly the same problem, basically that the audio playback stops working due to an unknown error. Again, with non-answers about codecs and third party software not working with Windows, until an addition from someone last year on Windows 10 with the same problem and an observation that YouTube playback is also affected. Sure enough, YouTube has stopped working again.

Oh dear, this post has turned into a rant. All this is making my brain hurt and the hours I'm spending just trying to get things to work have resulted in a literal pain in the arse from sitting for too long. After a week's ownership, I'm still struggling to get back up and running effectively and hoping I haven't made an expensive mistake.