I've felt grim all day. Partly not feeling great health wise, partly not feeling great in myself generally. Am I making any sense?!? Aaargh...

The thing that tipped me over the edge was that on Tuesday I went to my friend's house to help her sort her computer out. We did all the easy things, like change Outlook around so that the frames were the right size, and there was a folder for read e-mails, and how to do attachments, and so on. And then we did Internet Explorer, sorted out how "favourites" worked, changed the font from "large" (so there were more than 3 words on the screen at once), set it up so it went to her chosen homepage instead of "update IE", bookmarked Google... And after doing all that (I said it was easy), I decided to do a few additional tweaks to make things better. (Big mistake.)

She has a smallish monitor that's set to 640x480. I thought it'd be good if it'd work with 800x600, because then internet pages would fit. And there'd be more screen room generally. So I opened up properties, fiddled around, and it worked. I changed it up to more colours, too. I figured if it didn't like it, it'd be easy to change back, after all. It restarted (hours later, ancient PC from when Windows '95 was new) and was back to 640x480. Odd, I thought. I went back into properties, and it wanted to know what sort of a monitor it was. Fine, I thought, and since I didn't know (and it said if I didn't know to click on "OK"), I clicked on OK.

That was probably a stupid thing to do. It decided it was a laptop monitor of some sort. A 640x480 laptop monitor. I wondered what a laptop monitor was, and felt sad that it thought 640x480 was its maximum potential in life, but hey. I could live with that. that was what it said it was, that was okay with me. The computer restarted again, and it seemed to be fine. 640x480, but fine. Hooray, we all thought!

But when she turned it on last night, it was veeerrry confused. It had a majorly garbled screen. Five of each icon, that sort of thing. She called me, and I wondered about those monitor settings, but it wouldn't let her go into the properties screen and do anything. And it's hard talking people through stuff over the phone. (I have a newfound respect for helpline staff!)

She called another one of her friends, someone who actually works with computers, and he had to put it into safe mode to fix it. It was the wrong monitor setting. So why did it think it was a monitor laptop? No-one's entirely sure. But all the faith she had in my computing abilities has completely dissipated. :-(

And my inability to use computers is even greater than that one story demonstrates. On Saturday, I took the laptop downstairs to play Caesar III. I was building away, and the computer froze. Crashing isn't something Brian does a lot (hooray!), so I was concerned. I tried turning him off, but he didn't want to turn off. Unplugging the mains lead didn't help, because laptops have batteries (gosh, what a good idea). After a while, he just turned off. Nervously, I turned him back on, but he didn't load Windows. The screen just alternated between black, and, erm, charcoal grey.

I was scared. I panicked. I have this peculiar love for my new laptop. I don't really know why I like him so much. He's my new toy, I suppose. (My expensive new toy!) So I phoned the Medion support line. The guy who answered was great. He really was. After we'd figured out that my laptop was the silver and blue one, as opposed to the silver one (we had a few tense battery removals due to that gaffe, I can tell you), things went well. Taking the battery out, plugging the mains lead in, and starting the laptop led to a miraculous recovery! The laptop probably got confused between the mains and the battery, he said. So that was okay. It wasn't me being stupid, it was an easily fixable laptop problem.

But you know what the funny thing is? I found out it was just because the battery had run out. I'd plugged it in downstairs, true, but someone had turned that particular plug socket (in the 4 plug extension cable) off. So it wasn't on at all. And I'd been running it on battery power.

Boy, I felt stupid... I still do, for that matter!

So all this means I'm almost too scared to use computers.

But I managed to install a new printer tonight, so maybe there's hope for me yet.

Maybe...