series on breakdowns

The past week was just a series of things breaking down around our house. First our clothes dryer stopping working. I cannot recall the exact date when we fixed it previously, but it was within a few months of the last time we had it repaired. Our house has the worst possible location for a laundry area. I dare not call it a laundry room as it is more like a laundry closet. The problem is that the washer and dryer barely squeeze into the closet. The last time we had problems with the dryer, we shopped around for new ones and none of the ones that are made currently will fit into the closet, so we are forced to repair the ones we have. Soon after our dryer decided to stop functioning, our refrigerator started making scary sounds. It was like a slowly accelerating engine that would then deaccelerate. Up and down it would go all day long. It was especially obvious in the morning when I woke up as it was the only sound in the whole house. Fortunately, we have a really great appliance company near our house who helped us before. For under $200, he was able to fix them both.

Soon after buying our son a car, we heard a sound company from the back end of the car. I called my trusty mechanic to check it out. Both my wife and son complained about the brakes so I had him check those at the same time. Turned out that the brakes all needed changing and the noise was pretty harmless and should some day be fixed when our son gets a job and has money to fix it. At least the brakes are good, which is important for a new young driver!

The last thing to cause trouble was our Windows Vista laptop. For months the family account has had mysterious screens show up when you logged on. I tried downloading a couple of tools from a company called "PC Tools", hoping they would find this virus and kill it. I have Norton Antivirus on this laptop but I just thought I should try something else. After buying a couple of their tools, I was no better off than when I started. In fact a couple of days ago my youngest son informed me when I got home from work that the laptop was frozen. The new tools were complaining about the Windows Defender was running and it could not be running at the same time as these tools. It took me an around an hour to stop Windows Defender. Then the next day that same son told me that a third window was popping up when he logged on. It was in fact getting worse by the day. I had tried to update these tools and it hung the tool and the laptop. This morning I finally removed all of their tools and had to delete our family account and create a new one. For now all is back to normal. In my frustration last night with all of our computers, I decided to buy a new iMac for the family and a new MacBook for myself. I tried Windows for a couple of years and that was all I could take. I am back to an all Apple home again, like the good old days, 10 years ago when I had nothing but Apple machines. It is just not worth the struggle and fighting to have Windows any more.