I'm Knee-Deep in Laptop Hell!

I'm not the kind of guy who has an abundance of patience with technology. I think I'm correct when I say that it's supposed to make our lives easier, right? So, here I am struggling with it and ready to bitch slap an orphan.

I set a series of dominoes falling nearly two weeks ago when I downloaded the latest update of my Corel Videostudio X9 Pro editing program. What a colossal misstep. I haven't been able to edit a video since. I have spent countless hours exchanging e-mails with Corel's customer service and technical service people, while following their instructions to solve the problem. All of it for naught. The program still crashes every time I attempt to string together two edited clips.

Because I had the purchase of a new laptop better suited to edit videos on my to-buy list for 2017 (See last week's blog post here), I decided to go ahead and buy it now, download the latest version of Videostudio (X10) and just start over.

I choose an msi P Series laptop. I did as much research as I was willing to do over two or three days early last week. I know; I have friends who are thinking, why in the hell didn't he buy a Mac? The answer is simple: money! I didn't want to spend $1,200 on a laptop I'd want to replace in three or four years. I work for a living.

I purchased the still-sealed-in-the-box msi from a vendor on ebay. I'd done business with the same vendor before. It was shipped out the next day via UPS. Because I calculated it would arrive while I was in Chicago last week for the auto show, I had the package drop shipped to my closest UPS center for pickup. Retrieving it was the first thing I did Saturday morning.

Returning home from the gym (Despite my scale telling me a different story, I actually still think my daily workouts are accomplishing something.), I was ready to set up my new purchase and get cracking on editing a video or two. There's a knee-slapper. It's 9 a.m. on Sunday and I have yet to even re-install my editing program on the new laptop.

All day yesterday – and I mean, all day – was spent saving documents, photos and videos to my external hard drive. I have judiciously backed up my laptop to this hard drive at least once every two weeks for years only to discover none of it was on the external drive. Well, the recycle bin was with its gazillion bytes of crud, but that was it.

No doubt, if I were at least somewhat computer savvy, I could have done something else, but I wasn't in the mood to do the online research required to shortcut the task of saving the documents I wanted from my previous laptop; so, I went through my directories saving things manually. I began around 10:30 a.m. and finished up around 7:30 p.m. That was Saturday shot to hell.

Here I am on Sunday morning installing some of the things I use on the new laptop and waiting for Corel customer service to open so I can get them to allow me to re-install my X9 before I can purchase and install the X10 upgrade. The $1 million question: Will I actually be editing videos by this afternoon?

It's a mystery.

The next step: How to get my dual monitors working with the msi? So far: no joy.