Sunday, July 17, 2022

Thunderbird

As well as the hardware problems mentioned in my last post I also recently had a software problem.  Starting on Tuesday June 7, 2022 the default Windows 10 email program (Version 16005.14326.20970.0) starting displaying some of my received emails as unreadable markup language gibberish. Strangely my oldest machine using the default Windows Vista email program was still able to display these emails in a human readable format. Some internet research provided no clue as to what was going wrong or how to fix it.  So I decided to try the free email program Thunderbird.

Downloading Thunderbird was easy but getting it to communicate correctly with my Aol email server was a bit aggravating. If you make a mistake you can get into an unfixable state which requires erasing the Thunderbird folder in an obscure Windows directory and starting over. However with the help of considerable internet research and trial and error I eventually got things working.  Once set up correctly Thunderbird seems to work fine. The problematic emails are now readable.

So this problem ultimately wasn't a big deal. However it left me a bit annoyed with Microsoft. It is not to their credit that the Windows Vista email program seems to be superior to the Windows 10 one.  As well displaying emails correctly I prefer the whole user interface.  I much prefer the Windows Vista photo gallery program as well.  It seems like Microsoft figures that it doesn't pay to spend too much money on these sorts of basic functions. 

Sunday, July 10, 2022

Lenovo Chromebook 3

Early in 2020 I complained about a cracked screen on my HP notebook computer (model 15-b0015dx) which HP refused to fix under their warranty.  However I continued to use the machine for web browsing.  Besides the cracked screen the computer was prone to overheating and shutting down.  Perhaps this was causing long term damage as recently the disc drive appears to have progressively failed making the machine unusable.  The symptoms were as follows.  First the computer started closing some windows immediately after opening them.  This made some programs like Microsoft Solitaire unusable but others like the web browser continued to work normally.  Various purported remedies found on the internet failed to fix the problem but I didn't suspect a hardware issue at the time.  Then a few weeks later I noticed some of the icons normally on my desktop were missing.  I tried to reboot the computer to fix this but I ended up in the Windows Recovery Environment instead after some messages about automatic repair failing.  The recovery environment provides a MS-DOS window.  MS-DOS commands seemed to be working normally and I was able to save a couple files by copying them from the C: drive to a memory stick.  Then perhaps unwisely I tried running chkdsk.  This ran for over a day reported numerous errors and seems to have damaged my hard drive further.  When it finally finished MS-DOS could no longer find the C: drive making it hard to do much of anything.  Fortunately I had already saved the file I cared about most.       

My older Dell laptop which I had not been using much had failed more abruptly (probably also with a bad disc drive) a few months earlier so I needed a new machine for web browsing.  I ended up ordering a Lenovo Chromebook 3 - Model 82BA001FUS (11.6" HD Laptop - Celeron N4020 - 4GB Memory - 64GB eMMC - Onyx Black)  on sale from Best Buy for $79.  It was delivered a few days ago and I have been trying it out.

Chromebooks use Google's Chrome OS instead of  Microsoft Windows.  Together with a somewhat different keyboard layout this took a little getting used to.  It seems to work okay for web browsing the primary intended use.  However I don't (at least so far) find it as pleasant to use as the HP notebook (even with its problems).  The screen is noticeably smaller and displays less of a typical web page making for more paging up and down.  And I find the keyboard a bit awkward.  Although this is in part lack of familiarity.  It takes a little time to get used to using the alt key to emulate some of the missing keys (so for example delate is alt + backspace, page up is alt + up arrow and so on).  On the plus side the machine seems sturdier than the HP notebook and hopefully will hold up better over time.  The solid state drive is faster and may be more reliable than a mechanical disk drive but it offers considerably less storage and won't last forever as each memory cell can only be written to a limited number of times before becoming unreliable.

Bottom line I was attracted to this machine because of the cheap price and it seems functional.  However it is clearly low end, many people will prefer to pay more for a better machine.