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Thanks. The home network is indeed private, whether on cable or wifi, but the laptop still doesn’t see anything via wifi. Other suggestions?

I will confess I didn’t even realize Classic Shell had been retired. Been using it happily since Windows 8 days. While I’m glad to learn that Open Shell has come along to succeed it and that settings can apparently be carried over, I’m wondering what the advantage is to switching. Classic Shell seems to be working just fine for me (on Win10 1909), and if it ain’t broke…?

Well, it looks like it was actually a router issue. Resolved! Thanks for your response.

I’ve noticed I have some rather old .NET 4 patches that I had put on hold away back when … are they okay to install now?

KB2487367
KB2729449
KB2737019

More generally, .NET 4 was pre-installed on my computer. Is there a way to check whether any of my applications are actually using it? I’d be happy to uninstall it otherwise.

Many thanks to Susan for her excellent column – always a must-read for me!

Thanks to all for the comments.

LibreOffice – my worry with these clones has always been that they might not be 100% true to Word in terms of formatting etc. in some arcane way, though I confess I haven’t actually tried the software with the kinds of documents I work with (which aren’t terribly complicated), so I have no real basis for the concern.

Occasionally a colleague or other organization will send me a protected Word document with fields to fill out and such. I’m less worried about security in these cases and more with compatibility. These still tend to be doc format rather than docx, but I imagine that at some point Word 2003 may not be able to read new files for some reason. Do the Office clones work in doc or docx format?

Finally, I’m glad to be reminded that (a) any security issue is likely to be with macros, which I don’t tend to use, and (b) that my security software ought to catch bad files in the first place with their scans.

Again, thanks for the insights everyone.

Watching this brought back very happy memories of living in Derry – I could see my old house from the balloon!

Brilliant – I looked for that everywhere on their site and couldn’t find it. I’ll bet you found that via Google, which for some reason I never thought of doing. Many thanks – let’s hope it works.

Thanks, I did try that. But it doesn’t work. The problem is that CNN isn’t sending a text to my phone; it’s sending an alert to an email address which my cell phone company then forwards automatically to my cell as a text. (My company here in Canada is Telus, and the email address associated with my phone number is xxxxxxxxxx@msg.teluls.com, where the x’s are my phone number.)

Any other suggestions?

And two freezes since yesterday.

So — system to be returned.

Sigh.

So far so good … no freezes (yet).

Well, my thinking was that if there was something clear and obvious to try that would work, I’d rather do that than return the computer and get another one.

Re hibernation/sleep, I had already turned that off through the Control Panel power options, but someone suggested going into the BIOS, where I saw an option to disable SATA power management. I tried that this morning and so far … no freezes.

But yes, absent any other straightforward things to try I will be returning the computer after the weekend.

Many thanks for the suggestions and observations.

Thanks for the suggestions – I do indeed plan to contact the supplier – but since the response is much faster, friendlier and more helpful here than on their helpline I thought I’d try here first :). If I can’t figure out the mystery without a ridiculous amount of time and effort, I intend to just return the machine and find another one that will (I hope) just work out of the box.

Things getting loose inside the box – that makes sense to me. Can you suggest what exactly it is I should be reseating?

The freezing never seems to happen when I’m actually doing something with the computer, whether CPU- or disk-intensive, only when it’s idle. Sometimes it will be idle for a few hours, sometimes only a few minutes. Then – nothing.

Thanks, Joe. That did the trick!