Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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I killed my laptop!

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You know how I mentioned in my Thanks Giving post that I bought a new all in one printer on Saturday? Well, after I was done installing all the software for that on our desktop computer and my laptop I finally decided to install the software that came with my husbands HD video camera when we bought it three months ago.

I’d hesitated to install that software because it said it might cause problems with computers that had Roxio easy cd writer installed. I had a feeling that our laptop had that so I was really leary of adding the software. I hemmed and hawed about it for months as you can see …

Anyway, Saturday rolled around and I put the video camera software on the desktop and that seemed to go well so I went over to the lap top and I did a search on it for easy cd writer. I didn’t find any files that had that name or that phrase within them so I decided it must be safe to install the software. So I began installing it and went to do something on the desktop computer while it was installing.

When I came back to the laptop the software install was finished and there was a message to reboot the computer. So I did.

Bad Move!

The computer restarted and all I had when it was finished was a black screen with three of the scariest words that I’ve ever seen printed across the top left of the screen:

NO OPERATING SYSTEM

Ahhh! What? What did I do. What did I do? Why didn’t I listen to myself? I shouldn’t have installed that software! Ahhhh!

I rebooted the laptop a few times to be greeted by the same horrifying message.

I eventually shut down the computer in despair. I had the very tiniest hope that if the computer was off for a little while it’s memory might clear and if I was really lucky I might get a different message the next time I turned it on. Small hope I say …

In the meantime I remembered that I had tried to make restore disks when I first got the laptop last year. It took forever. I think I made 17 cds or something. I had the distinct feeling that the restore disks were not being created properly at the time, but I know I saved them. After all you can only access the system once to create restore disks so if they didn’t work I’d be up the creek without a paddle.

I went to look for the restore disks. I searched every room upstairs, the living room, dinning room and the basement. Chris was out at that Saga concert at the time so I was on my own in my search.

I never did find the restore disks. More than likely Chris moved them to some obscure place that I didn’t think to search, but I believe I searched through at least 70% of the house in all the obvious and not so obvious areas that one might hide 17 restore cds.

Eventually it was time to look at my dead laptop. I approached it slowly, sure that I’d see that terrible No Operating System message again when I turned it on. Much to my surprise and joy the computer actually booted into windows when I turned it on.

Of course it was full of error messages and my cd wouldn’t work right. I decided to go to the system tools folder and try system restore. My system wouldn’t restore itself back to the last restore point! I tried it a few different ways several times, picking different restore dates and it still wouldn’t work. I don’t believe I’ve ever had any errors on the laptop so I think this was the first time I’ve used system restore on it. I’ve used system restore on my desktop computer and it works fine. So I don’t know why it would on the laptop. I’ll have to try it sometime in the future.

I spent several hours using my “nurse” healing powers on my laptop. Manually uninstalling every program that the Video software program had installed. 20 programs installed – 20 programs removed. Finally … finally … the laptop worked with only one error for HP Photosmart Premiere (software installed for the new all in one printer).

That error seems to be sticking around, but I can live with one error message for a while until I figure out how to get rid of it.

The main thing is that the laptop is working again! It took hours and a mini heart attack to get it working again, but it’s running and I’m not going to try to install that video camera software again.





Automate your workplaces time and attendance calculations

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If you own or manage a business you might be interested in taking a look at Kronos Automated Time and Attendance software.

The old saying “Time is Money” certainly applies when it comes to managing your employees attendance records and overtime hours.

Kronos’ Time and Attendance software will not only save you some money by eliminating the need for paper time sheets or other products that you must purchase regularly in order to keep track of your employees work hours, but it will also decrease the time spent calculating each employees hours and attendance. This would free up the business owners time or the employee hired to do this task and allow them to be more productive in other areas.

I know when I’ve worked for companies that manually calculated each employees hours and pay there were always errors. There were forgotten overtime or allowances for working a certain amount of hours, sometimes days that I had worked were skipped and went unpaid, and vacation pay was occasionally incorrect as well.

All of these payroll errors just make more work for the person manually calculating the timesheets and cause employee frustration.

Kronos has created four different Time and Attendance software programs.

One of the programs is named “Workforce TimeKeeper” and it’s a web-based application that will allow businesses to eliminate errors that are often associated with tracking a companies workforces time and attendance.

The second program is called Timekeeper Central and it’s a client-server solution that’s been designed to help small companies manage, collect and distribute time and attendance data automatically.

Then there is the Kronos iSeries Timekeeper which is a time and attendance application for the IBM iSeries platform.

The final time and attendance solution developed by Kronos is called webTA. This program supports the federal governments unique time and attendance requirements.

As you can see Kronos has created software that will suit any business or organization whether large or small. Each of these programs have been designed to give a business better control over labor costs. The automated system will also allow businesses to apply pay and work related policies consistently across the board.

These seem like great time and attendance keeping solutions to me and I’m sure it would alleviate the headache of manually calculating time sheets for a lot of companies if they were to look into the Kronos Automated Time and Attendance software.

New software in the office

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Chris had a bit of a messed up day at work yesterday. They’re apparently upgrading all of the healthcare management software in the hospital and they were testing it out in Chris’ department yesterday.

I don’t know if they’ve ever changed the software over to a new program in your workplace, but it’s a pain in the butt. There’s always people that can’t figure it out, or worse, it’s a new complicated program unlike anything that was used in that workplace before so no one knows how to use it once it’s installed.

In the healthcare field this is bad news! There’s already enough delays in patient care due to most medical offices and hospitals being short staffed. A major software change causes even more delays as people struggle to learn new programs while they try to work.

That’s what happened in Chris’ department. No one had been trained on the new software so it was chaos!

They really should train people first before them implement a system wide change don’t you think?

Handy site lists 101 different tools to convert video, audio and more

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Earlier today as I was surfing the net I came across a site called Conversion Central. It lists 101 tools to convert video, audio, music, image, PDFs and more. I’ve already bookmarked the site because I’m certain it will come in handy when I’m trying to find something to convert some type of file into another in the future.

I wanted to tell you about the site, because I’m sure you’ll find it handy too.

I mean, there’s been times in the past when I’ve tried to find software that would convert video from my cell phone to the more common AVI format. It was a frustrating search that took hours, but I finally did find something that would convert the files for me. Now of course I’m sure the software that I downloaded has expired or is outdated so it’s nice to have found this site that lists just about every kind of conversion tool that you can imagine.

Not only will you find a multitude of tools that will help you with converting video, converting music or converting images into different formats, but you’ll also find software and tools that will convert PDF files to Word documents and other formats, or convert text and rss and other text formats to PDF.

Scrolling down the page I also found tools for converting Power Point, Excel, drafting documents to new formats and tools to convert measurements, temperatures, currency, and even clothing sizes!

You have to check this site out. I’d be surprised if you didn’t at least bookmark or favorite it, like I did, once you visit.

Dragon Naturally Speaking Medical cuts transcription costs for medical professionals

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The next time I go to work I’m going to have to tell the doctors that I work with in the ER about Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking – Medical dictation software.

Many of the doctors that I work with in the ER, regular medical doctors and specialists, dictate their notes via a phone service after they’ve seen a patient. Now, if they installed Dragon Naturally Speaking Medical on their office computer they could simply dictate their patient notes at their own computer. This software could dramatically lower transcription costs for hospitals, doctors offices and medical centers.

This software is said to have 99% accuracy. Dragon naturally speaking can be used with any type of medical software application as well as the full Microsoft Office Suite. I’ve used Dragon Naturally Speaking in the past, but this special Medical version contains a complete library of 14 medical specialty vocabularies covering over 60 sub specialties. The software can of course be further customized for individual specialty practices.

If you are a medical professional think about how Dragon Naturally Speaking Medical might save time and money for your office or practice.

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