Well, I'll start out this note with the tax form comments since it's Tax Day 2017 (April 15 fell on a Saturday this year). Maybe I've become used to fillable pdf forms; I really didn't anticipate any issues when I downloaded my part-year Arizona resident form (I moved from South Carolina in July)--until I got to the point of trying to print my completed form. I then saw some form of form trigger which displayed a message to the effect "if you are seeing this, it means you haven't completed all of the required form items. Look for the red-bordered form elements and complete them". I couldn't find any such items. Finally, I went to the state website and downloaded the non-fillable pdf form--and had to re-enter all the information from the original form (which of course I couldn't print for convenience). I absolutely hate duplication of effort. I can understand the logic of form triggers, but apparently this one had a bug and didn't allow me to manually override it.
As I've probably described in past posts, I now have 4 PC's--3 notebooks and a desktop. I had brought 2 notebooks with me to Arizona; the desktop was sent with my household goods. I discovered the bag for my first notebook become wet and the notebook wouldn't start at my first night's stay in Alabama. I had purchased the second as my backup, an inexpensive one. I had purchased that one because I had been unable to start up my desktop which had been buried in storage in WV when I moved to SC. Some months later, I discovered a flicker of life in the desktop just when I was thinking of junking it. There were complications with power sockets and a bug with Rollback RX (a second licensed copy), software I was using to enable snapshot resets. (I had run into repeated issues trying to reset the first workhorse PC which for some reason did not tolerate Rollback RX--after about 4 or 5 system resets to factory settings in 3 months, I finally stopped using Rollback RX--and had no other reset issues (until recently, over 2 years). And then on my second night in Texas (I think I've written about this in earlier posts), I tried to startup my backup notebook and was in the process of trying to attach a USB of backups (e.g., of email files) when the notebook went black. Not even the power charge indicator was lighting up and the power button refused to work. I was totally demoralized: I had lost 2 laptops in 2 days. Plus, my desktop wouldn't be available for at least a couple of weeks. So I ended up having to buy a new notebook at WalMart when I got to Arizona with all the fun and games of updating Windows, reinstalling all my applications, etc. In fact, I'm still using that one as my current workhorse, which means I now maintain 3 backup PC's. Well, the battery on the first laptop is shot, and occasionally the second gives me problems on startup--which I can usually resolve by pressing on the power key for about 45 seconds, release, and press again. (A few months I tried to restart my first 2 laptops and was pleasantly surprised to find both computers come back to life.) The downside is that I have to constantly update the Windows and security software on all the PC's.
So finally the first notebook (I'll call 'Alabama') started balking, hour-glassing to the point it was unusable. So I had to revert to factory reset. Which meant going all the way back to Windows 8. So then you have to sit through over 100 Windows updates plus. And when it finally gets there, you get a sales pitch to upgrade to Windows 10? What the hell? I had upgraded to Windows 10 some time back when it was free. Did that mean they now expected me to buy an upgrade just to get back to where my system failed? I soon became convinced through my Microsoft Support page that Microsoft "knows" the PC had been previously upgraded to 10 so all I had to do was download the upgrade software and install it.
I don't have the full installation of applications on each PC, although I maintain the latest core applications on a USB hard drive, and I have individual thumb drives with updated key portable apps.
So I could easily reconfigure, say, my Thunderbird email client, within a matter of minutes.
Then over this weekend, I was able to apply the latest cumulative 1607 patch to Windows 10 to all my PC's--except "Arizona", my current workhorse. I got one of those generic "we were unable to reinstall; we'll try again later." I tried running Upgrade Troubleshooter, etc. I'm not sure what exactly did the trick, but I think it was switching off the advanced option to let Windows download other patches--plus a system reboot.
Just a small tip to users of Chrome-like Slimjet (I occasionally download key video clips for my political blog): it looks like logging into Youtube and/or Google will toggle off the "download video" option.
