Things I Will Not Miss About My Computer at Work

Mostly Windows- and Outlook-related. XP even, not Vista.

• “Restore active desktop” button appearing on my desktop, behind my icons, for no clear reason.
• Recurrent “valkyrie.dll” issues.
• Normal.dot preventing me from shutting down.
• 20 minutes from turning the computer on until being able to do something with it.
• Daily emails telling me my “mailbox is full” (not exactly helping the problem, are they?).
• Receiving auto-generated emails telling me I should go look at the emails in my spam mailbox (?!).
• Not being able to reserve rooms for recurring meetings due to one over lap during the next millennium.
• “The data file ‘Mailbox – Dunn, Brian’ was not closed properly” and then waiting 5-10 minutes for Outlook to decide what to do about it.
• Launching an application, getting bored waiting for it, switching to a second application, getting in the middle of doing something (an Excel formula), and then having the first application take over again after deciding it wants to run after all.
• My (local) printer not working after un-docking “too many” times.
• Spotty wireless connectivity inside the building.
• Frequent hanging.
• Outlook taking 60 seconds to display the text of an email because (?) there’s a large file attached to it.
• The mailbox full dialog box offering to help delete emails in ways that don’t actually help. And then continuing to pop up after you’ve taken care of the issue.
• Having to attempt to launch Internet Explorer two or three times before it actually launches.
• Pulling an email back from the archive and having Outlook ask me whether I want to have the email retrieved “now” or “later”.
• Having Excel warn me Every Time I tried to open an Excel 07 document in Excel 03. Such clever marketers in Redmond!
• Attempting to close excel, answering the “do you want to save?” question for three of the four spreadsheets I had opened, then realizing that I needed to keep the fourth one open, clicking cancel, and having the first three spreadsheets reappear as open.
• Having emails sent from gmail addresses intermittently labeled “spam”.
• The “safeboot” security thing that increases boot time by five minutes for the sake of keeping someone from stealing the information on my laptop during all the travel I did in the last year.
• Emails disappearing into the either after six months of storage.

Wow — I’m getting mad just having to recall this stuff. Time heals all wounds. Time heals all wounds…

bkd

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