Thursday 19 April 2018

Computer rage!! But I fixed it!! Hooray!!


OMG I think this has to be about the longest computer/online dilemma I've ever endured. Things like this happen to us 55 year olds I guess. Often I look for the easiest and most sensible path out, but alas that was not the solution this time. Although I do take a bit of pride in my adaptability. I mean when I grew up the internet wasn't years off, was 20 or so years off before it started getting used by lots of people. And we were listening to vinyl records. No mobile phones. No ATM's. etc Now look what I've done with this blog :)

But anyway this disaster started some time back. I use the Opera browser as it has the free VPN for downloading movies and telly shows. Has worked marvelously since I got it. Fuck the bloody gov wanting my metadata; I bloody well have none! However I encountered a problem months ago where I couldn't log in to Google anymore on it, and thereby couldn't log in to this blog. The first two suggestions Google gave me I tried but to no avail. The last one was a hard one though, not because I didn't know how to do it but because Opera seemed to have no button to accomplish it. 


All it was was to clear the cache and browsing history. But I'm fucked if I could find anywhere in the settings to do that. In the end I just went meh, and did the next best thing, simply downloaded another browser. Easy. I chose Chrome as it worked marvelously. Problem solved :)


Until today.............


I was going to get another PC a while back, but you know the money was needed for other things. So I'm still nursing this 5 year or so older PC to what is increasingly looking like the near end of it's life. Five of the letters on the keyboard are completely worn away so you can't read them. Thankfully my hands seem to know what letters they are even if my eyes don't :s  


The PC however is increasingly throwing up roadblocks. Is it a cry for help I don't know. I do know though that I've got every bit of money's worth out of it, looked after it, and it's still going. Way better than a Dell (it's an HP). On today's occasion it was a serious roadblock of 55 year old dumbfounding proportions. Chrome stopped working! Gah!


I proceeded patiently to download and install other browsers of various shapes and sizes. None of them worked. They just wouldn't connect to the internet. Some of them wouldn't install, and one of them wouldn't even download even though I tried three fuckin times; it would nearly get there and say "error". WTF? Thanks Turnbull for that last one. I even tried the Firefox that I abandoned a while back because it was working so slow in this PC it was virtually unusable, but that didn't even connect. Even the horrifying Microsoft Internet Explorer. The only one that would work was Opera, which I couldn't log in to the blog on. FFS.


Overall this took about three hours out of today. I went back to Opera and again looked in the settings of where the fuck was the thing to clear the cache and history. Again, I couldn't find it anywhere, despite even going to advanced  settings.


In complete exasperation I Googled how the hell to do this in Opera. There were a lot of things about how to do that. It appears I'm not the only one exasperated with this Opera problem. Fucks sake clearing the cache and history is the most simplest thing, yet people can't see how to do it. Not even Opera help told me anything helpful.


In the end I found a site that said to put this in the address bar at the top: opera://settings/clearBrowserData . I did so and up popped what I'd been looking for for months. I did the deed "to the beginning of time" and tried once more to log into Google. I nearly bloody fainted when it all worked. David was asleep so I went bananas at Zac saying "I fixed it! I fixed it!" much to his pleasure. I have therefore saved the above address for future reference forever more. I'm now speaking to you from the Opera browser, evidently the only one that works anymore on this.


BTW probably at the end of the financial year when I put in my tax return to get the money back that they took from my Superannuation financial hardship payment, will be finally when I get a new PC. 

  

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