This second part of the technology series is more personal, and I have no idea why it's happening.
This past year my interaction with computers has seemed to kill them. My laptop, which worked fine for years for my father, then was passed to me, started freaking out. It was unable to sleep. I put it in sleep mode, closed the lid then later, when I opened the lid, it would have shut down. At first I thought it was weird but tolerable, I would turn it on and that screen that offered safe mode would start up, which I would ignore.
But then it started moving slower, taking longer to boot up, and still shutting itself down from sleep mode even when it was plugged into the wall. It got to the point where whenever I turned it on it would default to a "Windows Start-Up Repair" mode and that would run before my computer restarted and would then work fine. In it's entirety, starting my laptop would now take anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour. I gave up and moved to my desktop.
My desktop is special. It's got a super great processor and lots of storage space because it was designed with PC gaming in mind. I wanted it to go with my art tablet and any animation or editing software I might use for SCAD. My dad got it on sale for me with an awesome printer/scanner on Black Friday, and I spent a year paying him back every cent. It's the first computer that I've ever owned that was undeniably mine and not a hand-me-down. For two years it worked fine, but come this year, it started acting up too.
It now has almost the same start up problem my laptop has. Every time I turn it on it defaults to the "your computer was shut down improperly, would you like to access safe mode?" screen. Because it was shut down properly most of the time, I click on "start normally." It starts up really slowly now. Sometimes I can't wake it from sleep mode. I'll move the mouse, and it'll start to wake up until I can see the arrow and a black screen, but then get stuck. I've left it like that for hours to see if it will resolve itself, it never does, it just burns away the electricity bill, at which point I have no choice but to force shut down with the power button.
The other big problem with my desktop is what I like to call "ghost ads." I'll start up my computer, intending to listen to music from YouTube or my iTunes account while writing or drawing or browsing, but instead my ears will be assaulted with several audio tracks from video ads that you see in the margins or in pop ups sometimes. The problem is, I won't have any windows open. Sometimes I even shut down the internet access because I don't need internet to use the drawing, writing or iTunes programs. The ads continue. I sadly moved on from my desktop to the kitchen computer.
I don't even remember the issues that computer had. The computer in the kitchen is touch screen and self-contained. The monitor contains the computer, you just have to plug it into a power source. We have a wireless keyboard and mouse to go with it. And sure enough, when I started using it, it went haywire. My dad had to completely reset it. It took several days to fix because he had to reinstall every program. Now it remains my primary computer because my other two are still broken.
What scares me is that my computer use is hardly scandalous. I frequent websites that our antivirus software labels as safe, with limited exceptions. I don't download strange software or sign up for random giveaways. Any pop-up ads are immediately closed. Also, even though the two desktop computers' antivirus software was expired at the time of the problems, so was every other computers' in the house, including my parents' desktop and my siblings' laptops. The only computers with issues were the ones I interacted with.
I'm going to have my dad reset my desktop like he did with the one in the kitchen, which is a shame since I'll lose a lot of stuff. Hopefully I can get him to do this before I leave so I can take it with me to SCAD, since that was the original plan.
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