Work from Home Stories & Tips

  Memory means more than one thing. One type of memory would be your own, another would be your computer’s. I was going to limit this to computer memory, but I’ll mention personal memory first.

Throughout my life I thought I had an excellent memory, and would frequently think “I’ll have to write about this some time.” Well, as the years pass and events are added to memory, the older events get “filed away” somewhere and are only recalled when something triggers a recollection of that particular event. Begin keeping a journal now! It may take a little time to get used to jotting down notes, but eventually it will become automatic. When you reach my age (I’m now nearly 70) those events that you wanted to recall will be in your journal, and you will at least have some notes to jog your memory. This applies to business activities as well as to personal activities.

Now, to get to the main point of this post: For the past several months I have been thinking I needed to upgrade the memory on my desktop PC. I kept putting it off until this past weekend. In my last post I related my experience in purchasing and setting up a new multi-tasking printer. Since the printer still does not work properly for everything, and the computer really slowed down, I decided that it was probably because my computer did not have enough memory. I ordered a memory upgrade from Dell, my PC manufacturer, and am now patiently waiting for the new memory modules to arrive.

In the meantime, I called tech support for my online postage program. I had tried to set up the old printer until I could get the new one working properly with the postage application. Even though I had changed the default printer in the PC’s Control Panel, and had gone through the printer setup in the postage application, it still wanted to print on the new printer. I called the postage vendor’s support line, and the tech support guy said he’d get me going quickly. I said do you want to bet? He forced me to go through exactly the same steps I’d gone through before I called, and the result was the same as when I did it.

Despite the fact that anything else I print will print on the whichever printer I choose, the postage program will not. Do you believe, tech support told me it was not their application’s fault. I got fed up with him, and had to end the conversation because I had other things that were pressing and needed done right away. That caused me to forgo getting a refund for the postage that the application “thought” it had printed, and I’m out a few bucks due to this snafu.

I will wait until I get the new memory installed, and try the postage program again. If it still doesn’t work, and the vendor still cannot help, I will probably cancel the service and seek another postage vendor.

TIP: Don’t take memory or anything else for granted. Make adequate preparations in advance to try to forestall delays and errors. You’ll still run into problems, but doing some advance preparation and not putting things off to the last minute will probably cause fewer errors and problems in the future.

As a follow-up I got the new memory late Friday and installed it.  This quadrupled the memory of the desktop, and really speeded things up.  Everything (except the postage application) seems to be working properly.  I’ll give the postage application another try Monday, and if it still doesn’t work I’ll call tech support and give them one more chance.