Month: May 2013

Isn’t my computer pretty? That’s a Moko Case (purple too!)

Anyway, the point of this post isn’t to drool over purple cases, it’s to tell you about OneNote.

Yesterday I worked to load Office onto my computer. OneNote, my fave program of them all, was the one that gave me trouble. Somehow, my main notebook got corrupted. I kept getting this error: corrupted-cache-files-with-onenote, but none of the fixes presented worked. However, one person in the comments said that at one point they fixed it by moving data and creating a new notebook. I think that part of my problem was that my notebook was getting big. So I decided to split it into two notebooks, one that held the current season’s sections, and another that had stored, less accessed, info. (For instance, I’ve archived my skiing notes until next winter) I couldn’t open the file at all in OneNote for desktop, but had no problem using OneNote for Windows 8. So I created a new “Connie’s Note II” and used OneNote for Windows 8 to move the sections one at a time. Fortunately, the main tabs moved fine. The problem was the archived sections. I had them in the same note book under their own section group. I could access the sections, but not move them. Windows Live OneNote didn’t help me either. So I renamed the file to try to confuse my computer, and opened the file in OneNote for Desktop long enough to get a few sectioned moved at a time. Since the files were quite a bit smaller by that point it worked OK without any trouble. Whew!

OneNote notebooks don’t store in my Sky Drive folder, only a link to the website version. So when I do my backups and copy my synced files from my desktop to my external drive, I don’t get my notebooks. And exporting the files doesn’t seem to work as expected. So for now this is a sign that I need to at least copy the sections one at a time manually to a backup notebook saved in Sky Drive. At least until I figure out the exporting process. Copy and paste doesn’t even work for while notebooks.

The moral of the story is backup redundantly. I will never learn why my notebook got corrupted. But thank goodness for redundant ways to access it too. Even though I can’t open password protected sections in OneNote for Windows 8, at lease it copied them for me. And thank goodness that the corruption didn’t transfer to the new file.

Next time I will talk about my keyboard. And join that infamous conversation.

My replacement laptop came in two days ago. This PC is nearly identical to the one I had before (the Samsung Series 7 Slate). It even has the same model number. But there are a few minor differences. 

Firstly, this one came pre-installed with Windows 8. I’d heard that Samsung is now shipping PCs with lots of bloatware so the first thing I did after I turned it on and accepted the license was turn it back off and start it up in Recovery Mode (hold down the volume up key as you restart it). From there I was able to do a backup of the computer as it was. I used Backup, but as you see, you can actually do a Factory Image copy as well (this image is from the newest update of Recovery that had not been loaded when I started.)

 

Then I attempted to install Windows 8 Pro. Well, as you know, and I did not, even though my laptop was stolen the key would not work. I spent a long time messing with settings and uninstalling bloatware, and just trying to make it a usable machine once again. Finally, I gave up and used Recovery to restore the machine to factory settings (not my back up, just the factory on the machine).

I’m SO glad I did that. Turns out the factory reset doesn’t include any of the bloatware. I was left with a good machine that I could use to install My programs onto. Microsoft makes it super easy to get back all the Windows 8 programs using the store. Why the computer manufacturers try to include software to start is beyond me. It’s unnecessary and wasteful. But at least it wasn’t wasting space in the recovery portion. And Windows 8 not Pro isn’t so bad. I wasn’t really using any of the Windows 8 Pro features anyway. I’ll get another license after I start school because I’m sure we will be using some of the features in class. But I have until then to worry about it.

So, the moral of the story is. Reset your computer first thing when you get it, and don’t waste a whole night only to end up back at factory by the morning.

Next will be the story of how One Note took up a whole day of my life and I nearly lost everything.