Last week, I couldn’t access my personal blogs. My laptop informed me it was “unable to connect,” and suggested that it was a problem with internet connectivity. It wasn’t one of those annoying commercial antivirus messages telling me the site wasn’t safe. It was more basic than that. I could connect to about half the WP blogs I read regularly, but with the others, I got the same “unable to connect” message as with my own blogs. I had to use my phone, or my husband’s laptop, for those I couldn’t access from my laptop.
For many years, I’ve identified myself “low tech” (in spite of my love of Star Trek) and have little confidence in my computer technology skills. I become easily frustrated with technological trouble shooting. So I asked my smart husband to take a look at this “unable to connect” situation. He couldn’t figure it out either. I suspected some mysterious computer gremlin had chosen to block specific blogs. But why? I figured I have to take the laptop to somebody or wade through “help” systems or tutorials. Ugh.
Just for the hell of it, I went to my internet settings and found the trouble shooting section, which I had not previously found on my new (windows 10) laptop. I don’t know if I can even get back there. No, that’s not true. I got there once, I can get there again. Anyway, I somehow found a way to click on something about trouble connecting to specific websites and asked the computer to find a solution. It gave me some gibberish about something missing on some gobbledygook that neither my husband nor I understood. After I asked the computer to find a solution to that problem, it said the issue remained and was not fixed.
However, after this interaction, I discovered I could access all my favorite blogs again, including my own! Yay!
I don’t know if I fixed the problem or what. There are still gremlins in my laptop. They used to tell me Webroot did not want me to go to 75% of the sites I wanted to go to. Now they direct me to Wickipedia 75% of the time. But those gremlins won’t stop me. I know how to work around them.
And maybe, just maybe, I’m not as low tech as I thought. We’ll see.
FYI: My plan for April is to write about low tech stuff I love, like NATURE!
(I found the photo on pixabay under technology – computers. I have no idea what it is, but thought it was interesting.)
Anything is Possible! 