Also, make sure the computer is plugged in

I am still officially on break and trying to decide if I even want to keep this blog going or not, but I thought I'd share today's lesson, called: Don't Overlook The Obvious.

For some time, I've had a few minor problems with my computer. I recently started doing regular weekly maintenance and things have improved a lot (thanks mostly, I think, to CCleaner). But there were still two things wrong and I was afraid I'd have to go through that "start over again from the recovery disk" routine, which I really don't want to do unless the machine just flat stops working.

Problem 1: IE would not connect to the internet. Firefox worked. Opera worked. Everything else worked. But not IE. For several months I would go a-googling every now and then to see if I could find any solutions, or at least get a vague idea of what might be the actual problem. I had not been able to find anything that solved the problem. But I had overlooked the obvious. I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before, or why it finally came to me today, but I suddenly thought: What about the firewall? So I checked and, sure enough, my firewall was blocking IE from accessing the internet. I don't know how that happened. So I checked the "allow" button and poof! I have IE again. Although I hardly ever use it, unless I come across something that looks like it isn't displaying properly in Firefox, then I might fire up IE to get another look at it. Also if I make any changes to the template here I like to be able to look at it with different browsers because I know other people out there will be using them.

Problem 2: Gimp was not displaying properly. You know that section on the bottom where all the tool controls are, where you can drop down the menu for different fonts and so forth? That was gone. I don't know how it disappeared or why, but it was just gone. I haven't really felt like learning some new software because I've come to know Gimp pretty well, but I couldn't find anything that might tell me what was going on. So today, since I was on a roll from fixing IE, I took another look at it. I simply went to File > Preferences > Window Management and clicked on "reset saved window positions to default values." That was all it took. I have a suspicion this problem was caused by my daughter because she likes to play around with Gimp and Photofiltre a lot, but she doesn't always know exactly what she's doing (contrary to popular opinion).

So maybe I can start doing some p-shopping again now that I have Gimp back the way it should be.

And don't forget today's lesson: Don't Overlook The Obvious.