BEWARE - Low Flying Laptops.

Today I decided that I really should do some homestudy.

To be honest, I had never planned to do any during the week, as I am having to work extra hours to make up for the time I am having off to follow this work pushed qualification by the time I get home I really can't face any study.  I am up at 5am, out the door at 6.40am which, this week, has meant that I have arrived at work between 7.45 and 8.25am, leaving work at 4.30 gets me home between 5.50 and 6.30pm.  If I had a car things would be so much easier as it would take me about 15-20 minutes each way.  But I digress.

My plan today was to get the housework and shopping done in the morning so that it was out of the way and not peering over my shoulder all afternoon.  My washing machine was to be the indicator of my breaks, a load takes about one and half to two hours which is a nice length for a study session, my break would then be to empty and refill the machine.

That was the plan.

Having put the first load into the washing machine, I took my flask of coffee (yes, I know) up to my study area aka the box room.

Now my laptop and printer are really on their way out, I coaxed them through 3 years of AAT but I am not sure how much longer they will last but unfortunately with the amount that I am having to put away each month to pay for the course I have no idea how I am going to afford replacements. But again, I digress.

I switched everything on and logged onto the website of my training provider.  This is where it all started going wrong.  Now, I don't know if it was the website or just that the laptop could not cope with the size of the website but my laptop froze.  The mouse would not work, the keys would not work so I couldn't shut down from the windows menu nor ALT-CTRL-DEL so had to hold down the power button.

I then rebooted, but as the laptop had not been shut down correctly I had to wait for it to go through all the checks.  This happened twice.  I had to do a complete back-up and then delete a load of files which I will need to upload again one day.

My study area

Eventually I made it through the website and found the download I needed for the interim assessment I needed to complete.  The next hurdle was printing it.

A year or so ago, my printer had a complete meltdown and would not do anything and eventually I had to uninstall it.  When I tried to reinstall it I could not find the installation disc so had to download the driver and installation software from the web.  Because my printer was a few years old, the download was for a later version of the model which evidently had a display screen on the control panel so everything I attempt to do now is accompanied by the pop-up message 'Please check display'. I can't check the display, I haven't got one.  Printing a single sheet of paper takes 3 sheets and about 15 minutes.  Plus for some reason the printer will not work if it has more than 4 sheets of paper in the feeder. I was not looking forward to printing off 16 sheets of paper.

But the printer worked without a hitch! (Now I have jinxed it). It may have heard me threatening the laptop that it was going out the nearest window on more than one occasion during the afternoon.

By this time I could hear the washing machine going into the throws of its final spin, so my first study session was coming to an end.  Ninety minutes plus and all I had done was print off the assessment.  

It is now 8pm and I am only half way through the assessment but I am done for the day.  I have a bottle of wine and some chocolate cake with my name on in the fridge so I will continue tomorrow. Hopefully with more luck than I have had today.