Today I became a momentary hero in the eyes of my son Richard. When we were planning our trip up here last month, he mentioned that there were some things needing fixing he would like me to have a look at. I got two assignments yesterday and finished them both today.

The first was to get their HP laptop working well. It is running Windows 8.1 which isn't so good. Their complaint was that it is slow. And indeed when I booted it up it was slow. I got to looking around and found that there were a number of updates that needed to be installed. The computer hadn't been used for quite a while. Downloading updates can really slow a computer down. So when I shut down to install updates, it said there were 70 of them to be installed. The restart led to lots of waiting. Well, the restarts and installations were numerous. I figure that by the time it was all done, there were over 100 of them. Still the thing was slow and the symptom was 100% utilization of the disk. After quite a bit of internet surfing, I found a "fix" that seemed to help. Then I uninstalled their Avast virus protection software and installed the Microsoft Windows Defender which has worked well for us. That seemed to help the speed a little. So by the end of it all, the machine was working well.

The second task was to replace the light bulbs in his driveway light post. I had looked at it before and didn't spend much time on it. This time I got a ladder from next door and waded through a very dense hedge to get at the thing. Getting access to the bulbs was a problem before because I couldn't see the top of it. Turns out there are two screws that hold the finial on and their removal made access possible. I only replaced two of the three bulbs because one of the sockets was badly corroded. But the other two worked. That is the subject of today's photo. Good job, John. You have earned your beer with dinner.