Desktop

Here I sit in front of the desktop, blogging on the tablet because after maybe 15 minutes of churning it still won't launch iTunes and frankly I have no idea what it is doing. I had this thought that there are a lot of photos piling up on my phone and I've loaded a few apps since my last sync and so I should probably sync the portables with the home machine. Not more than a few seconds after booting the thing up did the problems begin.

Really there a a bunch of issues. Foremost is that the tablet and the notebook combined have pretty much killed the use of my desktop, so it doesn't get turned on all that often. As you may have discovered, if you don't regularly turn on a windows box once you do all it wants to do is run updates.

Right off it appears that the anti-virus and the firewall need updating, plus java, and acrobat. It seems like Dropbox took it upon itself to upgrade. Several hours ago when I first started this trek and after a long wait iTunes actually launched it informed me that a new iTunes was available and recalling the last time I did this it occurred to me that this wasn't the first time I'd gotten that notification. So i went for that update, and pretty much immediately the computer hung. I waited a respectful amount of time (while at that moment pricing new desktops on the tablet) and then control-alt-deleted my way to a shut down.

At which point the machine wanted to run 22 windows updates. Did I mention that this is an XP box?

So one Archer and one Mythbusters later and the machine has run through its OS updates and I restart again. This time it occurs to me to pause the Dropbox sync as there are about 100 files there looking for a home (many of which are the same photos I mean to be downloading from the phone as is - note to self: streamline photo archiving process). We've rebooted, gotten the virus, firewall, java, and adobe notifications again, launched itunes and waited a respectful amount of time, and this time forgone any effort to update iTunes until after doing the device sync - which is why I think I skipped that step the last time as well.

I got the phone process started and I'm staring at a 99% complete status on the first photo, which I full expect to fail as it is a fairly long video, and a 2 of 7 phone sync process.

I think I'll be here a while. Maybe I should check to see if the laundry machines are empty.