OF MICE AND WOMEN

What is the matter with the people who write computer manuals?  Pages and pages about wiring the plug - it comes with the bloody plug, stupidini! - pages about how to sit at the thing - if I wanted a yoga lesson I'd go to a yogi - and, this being an Italian manual, several pages about how to clean the machine.  Why?  If you never get as far as the pages that tell you how to use it, it won't need much cleaning, will it?  It stands to reason.

Naturally, it couldn't stop working at a time when the computer shop was open, could it?  And needless  to say,  the manufacturer's helpline was closed too.  "You can consult our online service" said a recorded voice helpfully.  But I have to get online to do that and one of my problems is that I can't!

After approximately three hours of frustration and cursing because I don't have a three-year-old child who could have fixed everything immediately, I discovered by accident that if I held down the left-hand bar of the touch pad and clicked at the same time, I could get the arrow keys to function and this enabled me to get online.  But I still couldn't use the touch pad to click things properly.

Next  I boldly  went to the manufacturer's "help" site, only to find that I needed to select the model number from a drop-down menu containing thousands of them. Where TF is the model number on my machine?  It is nowhere obvious so I consult the useless manual again and see that it covers a range of approximately thirty models.  Couldn't someone have underlined which one I've got when I purchased it? Well, the only place I haven't looked is underneath the keyboard and lo and behold, there is the model number!  Now we are getting somewhere - the only trouble is, I still don't know where, as the "help" on the manufacturer's site is obviously designed for Larry Page himself and involves doing incomprehensible things to the motherboard. Now I am fairly fearless when it comes to computers but this sounds suspiciously like a process requiring a screwdriver.

An hour later I find a less geeky forum and I am no longer alone in the universe, for other people have had this problem! And all I have to do is find "mouse" on the control panel and muck around with the touch pad settings!  Five minutes later everything is working again and it is all I can do not to hug my computer like a teddy bear.  Of course, I could have solved the whole problem much earlier by plugging in a mouse but HTF was I supposed to know that?!

Normal service will be resumed around here tomorrow.