I know I say it a lot but here goes again. I’d rather work on hardware than software. I have always like screwdrivers and hammers and pliers. I’ve always enjoyed putting things together. Or taking them apart.

I used to enjoy working on the software side of computers, too, but as Windows has morphed into a ginormous mess, I find myself wishing for a night with my favorite wine of the month so I can just forget about computers all together. That’s serious; I love computers. Usually.

This past week has been one software or OS crisis after another. I’m going to try to get over it and move on. Okay, I’ll blog about my solution but then I’m going to find something better to think about. Like a screwdriver.

The other day my XP desktop shut off all by itself. When I rebooted it, the screen displayed an error message having to do with Thermal something or another. (It was a few days ago but I wrote it down somewhere around here….) I googled the error and found mostly references to capacitors and the motherboard. Darn.

I wanted to do a memory upgrade on this machine but if there is a serious problem with it, any kind of upgrade would not make much sense. And since this computer is a little older and uses DDR (as opposed to DDR2), the RAM is a little more expensive. I’m just not sure what to do.

Other than that one error – and it hasn’t happened again – the computer runs fine. If it’s going to die, I probably won’t replace it right now since it’s one of four computers in my office. I just wish I could figure out if that error was just a hiccup or if it’s about to die on me.

Our cable company is a small outfit. That’s both good and bad. It’s good in that our prices are reasonable; it’s bad because we have to wait forever to get extra services. Like internet.

With the government dictating that all cable operators must offer HDTV by 2009, my cable company decided it was a good time to also roll out cable internet. I’ve been waiting patiently for it to get to my neighborhood and have called the office at least once a week for the past several months. Did it pay off? Well, I have the distinction of being the very first customer in my neighborhood to be hooked up to cable internet. And yes, I’m loving it.

I’ve also figured out that this is going to save me some money over time. I think I’ll put that savings away until I have enough for a new HDTV. I’d like to get either an LCD or plasma mounted to the long wall in our family room.

Looks like we’re finally catching up to the rest of the world. Sort of.

Last week I did a quick upgrade to my neighbor’s laptop. Her computer is running great and now I have this urge to upgrade my own laptop. The last thing I did to this machine was the new hard drive.

This laptop is three years old and has served me well. I have a newer desktop and two older desktops that I use daily. I keep this one in my bedroom when I’m not traveling. Like now, I’m watching TV and typing this. I use this laptop more and more so I really think some extra computer memory would be a wise upgrade. It could keep this baby going for another year or two.

I suppose I’ll add that to my “to buy” and “to do” lists. They’re sure getting long!

Last week I got into one of those “girly” moods. I did a lot of online window shopping for dresses, shoes, makeup and jewelry. I made a nice long list of everything I wanted. This week, the girly seems to be gone and my inner geek is surfacing.

I’ve spent the past few hours surfing every electronics and gadget store out there. I’ve made lists of stores, items and prices and put them all in a spreadsheet. Ha! My girly list is a word document with purple text; my geeky list is a spreadsheet. I just realized that and it’s kind of funny.

Anyway, I think what I really want is a new phone that does all the cool things that my current phone doesn’t do. That’s on the top of my list. And if I get a girly urge, I’ll get a pink phone. Or purple.

I’m still searching for a replacement for my Samsonite wheeled computer case but I just can’t find what I want. I guess part of the problem is that the pictures online just don’t seem detailed enough. Or maybe I won’t be happy until I can actually touch, hold, feel what I’m buying.

The other problem is that I really love my luggage and would prefer a computer case that matches or at least coordinates with it. It’s hard to tell that online. I guess I should plan a shopping trip as soon as this weather breaks. I’ll be needing travel gear by September for sure, and maybe sooner.

Normally, I hate winter. I hate snow and freezing weather. I’ve just realized something interesting, though, that makes me maybe not hate winter quite so much.

My Verizon DSL behaves much better when the weather is cold. On those few unseasonably warm days that we’ve had during the past few months, my DSL got flaky. So, it appears that warmth, and possibly melting snow, makes my DSL go away. Imagine that.

Now I’m thinking that I’d rather just learn to deal with the bad weather. I’ll bundle up with my thick fuzzy socks, warm sweater and sweat pants and sit here at my computer sampling the latest delivery from the wine of the month club while I blog and surf.

Sure beats dealing with the Verizon tech support people for hours on end.

We’ve got some crossed signal around here and I’m getting very frustrated with it. My mom has had the same land line phone number forever. Or longer. I’ve had my cell phone number for over 10 years. That’s a long time, too. Any time my mom has needed to call me from her land line to my cell phone, she dials the 7-digit number and gets through just fine. That all changed about a wee or so ago.

Each time my mom called me last week, she got a guy in the neighboring state. Granted, the neighboring state is just across a river from us and is a local call, but still. What the heck happened all of a sudden to cause this? She was able to call me using the area code but my mom was worried that meant it was a long distance call. Now she’ll only call me from her cell phone.

I did call my cell phone carrier, Alltel, to ask about the problem and they assured me they would check the cell phone signal and how they’re communicating with Verizon in that area. We’ll see where that goes. My mom is supposed to call Verizon but in the past, Verizon isn’t the easiest company to get help on such matters. I’d rather start with Alltel and contact Verizon only as a last resort.

Anyway, isn’t that an odd problem, especially when it had never been an issue previously? Yeah, I thought so too.

I’m very angry at HP right now.

I’m trying to fix a laptop that belongs to a girl whose sister is engaged to my oldest son. This laptop is out of warranty. I have no problem fixing it but it would be nice if someone from HP would talk to me without requiring me to give them my credit card number.

Here’s the problem: I get a disk read error when I try to boot up. It won’t go any farther than that. It won’t let me boot to Safe Mode or to a C prompt. How the heck am I supposed to fix it if I can’t go anywhere? The Windows XP CD that comes with the computer didn’t help, either. UGH! All I wanted from HP was to know if there was a secret way to get to Safe Mode or a C Prompt. I didn’t want them to troubleshoot for me; I didn’t want much of anything at all. What a shame that HP doesn’t stand behind their products. What a shame that their tech support has become so shoddy.

My guess on this machine is bad RAM. But it’s just a guess and I’m repairing as a favor so I don’t want to tell this girl to buy RAM if that’s not the problem. I don’t think it’s a bad hard drive since the diagnostic I ran came back with a clean bill of health. Perhaps it’s time to ask about a life insurance quote on this HP laptop so we can bury it.

I’m really disappointed in HP right now. I’d recommended them before because I was always able to get help for products, even when they’d lived beyond their warranties. That’s why I’ve got an HP desktop and laptop of my own, 3 HP printers, an Ipaq and an HP camera.

I guess we can add HP to the list of companies that now don’t care about their customers. I think companies know they can treat the consumer badly and we’ll keep coming back for more. Well, not this consumer. Not this time.

Oh, and if anyone knows about computers and has an idea about this problem, speak up. Before I buy RAM.

Taking a cue from Graywolf, I’ve spent a little time today taking stock of my must-have productivity tools. In doing so, I realized that I tend to march to my own drummer at times, most noticeably when I refuse to try the newest, latest and greatest of whatever is out there.

For instance, my first email was a pop3 account so any web based email just feels inferior to me. It doesn’t matter that gmail has a gazillion really cool features that I would probably love. I use my gmail account almost exclusively for Google things, like signing in to my account or for my adsense stuff.

Anyway, here are the websites and software that I use every single day. This is what makes my work easier. This is what I don’t want to live without. I’ll cover the ones that I share with Graywolf first then add a few others.

Firefox. I cut my internet teeth on Netscape Navigator. IE came loaded on Windows 95 but my ISP instructed me to download NN and I did. (Same ISP that hired me 2 1/2 years later.) When Netscape got crappy I moved on to Opera – and paid for it. Until Firefox. Love the tabs, love the extensions. Hate that it slows down and acts weird when I open more than 30 tabs.

Twitter: I signed up for Twitter quite a while ago then promptly forgot about it. Until recently, that is. As soon as I found twitterfox, an extension for firefox, I fell in love. Keep me updated. Tell me what you’re doing and what cool things you’ve found. Entertain me. I love my Twitter people!

WordPress: It all started in 2000 when my friend Amity introduced me to LiveJournal. This wannabe writer found an outlet for all the thoughts and ideas that had previously had no where to go. Fast forward to 2006 and some very generous bloggers who showed me the advantages to installing my blog on my own previously static website using WordPress. I’m hooked.

Google Reader: Yes, I’m angry with Google. I’m not happy about some of the stuff that they do. Whatever. I like their Reader. I like how it’s laid out and I like that I know, mostly, how to do the things I want to do there. It’s comfortable. And it helps me to not have to open so many tabs in Firefox when I want to catch up on my favorite blogs.

Besides the above sites and software that I use, here are a few that weren’t mentioned on Graywolf’s site.

StumbleUpon: Nothing generates traffic so consistently as being Stumbled. Even better, I’ve found some of the most entertaining, educational, inspiring and just plain good sites by Stumbling. I’ve had the toolbar installed for several versions of Firefox. Why did it take me so long to start using it?

FileZilla: Didn’t think I’d ever give up my WS-FTP software but it took just a few days of using FileZilla and I’ve never looked back.

IrfanView: Has it really been 11 years? I first downloaded version 1.98a in 1996 and it’s still the best image viewer and simple graphics tweaker around.

EditPad Lite: I’ve never used a wysiwyg editor to build websites. I’ve always used a simple notepad replacement and this one has been my faithful standby since I switched from EditPad Classic. Hey, it’s got tabs. I love tabs, remember?

BKcolorcoder: I love software that does what it’s supposed to do and does it well. This does. It lets me choose colors when designing websites and it even has the ability to snag a color from the desktop and give me the Hex code for it. I wish I could get it to run on my Vista machine so I wouldn’t have to switch to my XP or W98 computers. Damn Vista.

XAMPP: A huge Thank You to Geeks Are Sexy for the easy-to-follow tutorial on using this to run WordPress locally on my XP machine. Now I can test on my computer before going live.

Myhq.com: I might as well end this list with another throwback. I know there are more popular or feature rich bookmarking sites. I don’t care. I like this one. I like that I can choose how to lay out my page or the color scheme. I like that my bookmarks are private, just for me. I like that I can do a one click bookmark from my FF toolbar. I like that I know how to use it.

So, there you have it. Those are the websites and programs that help me to get things done. As I said at the beginning, I tend to stick with the stuff that works. That’s probably good, in that I don’t waste time trying new stuff just for the sake of new stuff but it’s probably bad in that I’m sure I’m missing out on some really great new things, too. That’s why I’m trying out BlogDesk right now, since Graywolf mentioned it. So far, I like. Adding several blogs to the software was very easy; posting has been gone without a hitch. This may just be my first new favorite find of 2008. Thanks, Michael.