Lost my toolbars and can't figure out how to get them back.

[Clipper]

All of a sudden my toolbars at the top of the page are gone. I had them yesterday, then they disappeared. At one point I could move my cursor to the top of the page and they would appear, but now even that doesn't work. My menu toolbar is the one that I am concerned about. Basically that menu bar and the google toolbar are the only two that I ever use.

I use firefox as my browser. Anyone know how I can correct my problem?

[clarencebunsen]

You should have a red box that says "Firefox" in the upper left corner of your screen. If you click on that it should open a two column box in that corner. In the left column is a heading "Options" with a right facing arrow. If you hover your mouse on that another column should appear showing the toolbars available. Any tool bar checked should be displayed. Click on the individual toolbars to check or uncheck them. I just figured out another way, right click at the top of the page. That should also display the toolbars available. I don't know why modern designers think it's cool to hide stuff.

[Clipper]

Thanks Clarence. I wonder how they ended up hidden like that to begin with. I had done nothing to change it. Ya gotta love the frustrations that go with the joys of owning a computer, lol.

[dave]

Up to you, but you may also want to do a Tools/Options/Advanced/Update Tab and click on "Never check for updates." Or, "Check for updates but let me decide." I had the damnedest trouble with Firefox when it updated itself to a new version for which a few of my add-ons didn't work (yet) and other things that aren't supposed to happen but somehow do... unless it's my imagination. It's possible that your Firefox might have updated and the toolbar went to the installation default, which I think on the newer versions (I'm sticking on v17 for now, Thank you) is to not show all the toolbars.
For anyone who wants a copy for the above reasons, I have a nice collection of Firefox installation packages from Firefox Setup 8.0.1 through 17.0. I got a little anal about it.

[clarencebunsen]

They have gone a bit crazy with updates. I believe I'm on version 24 of Firefox and 29 of Chrome. For a while it drove me crazy when FF would update and then tell me that something I didn't know I had was broken. It hasn't done that to me for the last few updates.

[Clipper]

Wow, I can't believe how many times Firefox has updated without my realizing it. I am on version 23.0.1 and don't remember being notified of all of those updates. Last update was in August, so I doubt that it caused the problem I had yesterday.

I changed it to where it will notify me and let me decide if I want to take advantage of the update.

[dave]

Oct 5, 2013 13:26:27 GMT -5 clarencebunsen said:

They have gone a bit crazy with updates. I believe I'm on version 24 of Firefox and 29 of Chrome. For a while it drove me crazy when FF would update and then tell me that something I didn't know I had was broken. It hasn't done that to me for the last few updates.

Depends upon what you're using for add-ons and extensions. My memory of FF is that every single time they updated they had not done the code support for FireFTP, an app I use frequently to update website files. Some of these companies are so gobsmacked with the stampede to mobile apps they are falling down on their commitments to current desktop users. Google has for at least three weeks had a problem with their Blogger software where bloggers throughout the world have been unable to use text gadgets, most often used in sidebars. That means I can't put up the daily happenings in my community blogs and can't make any changes to them either. It is unprecedented for a problem to go unfixed for this long and it is terrible customer service for Google to not revert to an earlier version so that bloggers all over the world can updates their sidebar items. Google must be pretty pleased with themselves to not worry about what hundreds of thousands of bloggers think.

[Clipper]

Your extensive use of blogging sites presents a unique problem as opposed to my simple browsing and social networking. I always feel badly when you lose something that you thought to be safely archived on one of those sites. Do you use some sort of cloud storage or something to insure that your writings are not lost?

[dave]

I use an external drive. I did try the cloud but it rained on me, so to speak. Google has a free offer for so many megabytes, but before they did so, I utilized DropBox, a similar service. These services maintain an automatic updating service.
Let's say you have ten stories on your desktop and you put them on the DropBox cloud. When you later turn on your laptop which we'll assume also has the service loaded, it goes up to the cloud and retrieves any new files it doesn't have, or newer versions. Then let's say you change or update a file on your laptop. As you do so, it goes up to the could and then back down to the desktop to put the new versions on that machine. Fine and dandy, and it evidently keeps track of which is the correct version by checking the time and date stamp.
So how the hell that got screwed up is beyond me, but it did.
Here's what happened. I didn't turn my laptop on for a few days or a week, was writing and editing a lot on the desktop such that the laptop stories had none of the new stuff I put in the desktop stories. I went down to the firehouse where I volunteer answering the phone (non-emergency) and since it's pretty quiet there (on the non-emergency phone line at least) I usually write and edit while I'm there.
Here's the picture. The newer story versions are on the desktop at home and on the cloud. When I turn on my laptop, instead of getting the new stories from the cloud, it sends the OLD stories up to the cloud which takes them as new and replaces all my new versions on the desktop pc with OLD versions. In other words, I lose a weeks worth of work. That's when I stopped the service and went out and bought an external DVD drive.
So, I don't have off-site back up, and I have to figure out some way to arrange that. Although my working files ... writing, blogs, website, etc amount to a large number, I could probably get what I feel is important on a DVD and mail copies to my kids.

[clarencebunsen]

When I had to manage engineering documents any change upped the revision level and it was (in theory) easy to track where you were in an edited document. Since I mostly worked for small companies if I went to the files and found something I needed marked "Change Pending" the person responsible probably worked at the next desk and it was easy to find out what was going on.

My wife has to work with policies to which many people have access and for which the sign off procedure is detailed and extensive. I'll have to ask her how they control documents in the middle of a change.

I had a problem with a Microsoft update a couple weeks ago which stressed me for a few hours. On my main computer (a notebook) I use Office Starter. It came pre-installed, was free and adequate for my needs. The update on the last Patch Tuesday broke it, my documents would not open and a message wanted me to install the latest paid version of Office. I discovered this just a few hours before I needed to record minutes for a meeting.

I found a work around to open Word Starter but it was so slow that it was unusable. I ended up creating a new document in Libre Office (which I don't particularly like, just unfamiliarity I guess) and going at it the next morning. It turns out that in order to repair Office Starter I had to click a link that said "Uninstall" (not my first guess) and then an option to repair appeared. I was back in business but I remain unsure if I want to continue using MS Office.

[dave]

In the last school network I ran, a document was protected in one of two ways. If it was a "public" document, that is available to more than one user, it was locked to other users when someone was working on it. If it was a private document, no one else could get to it anyway. We did once have a problem with someone storing a doc locally on their hard drive and thinking they were in control of it while they worked on it locally.

I do think I figured out later why I had the problem with DropBox and I think I caused it. But it left a foul taste in my mouth and I never re installed it. And by the time I thought of it, I had taken down the installation and thrown the software overboard.
Here's what I think I did. DropBox was designed for the user to install a main program somewhere on his network (among his wi-fi connected PC's) and then I think you took a disk or memory stick from that installation to the other machines. I was out of town when I decided to add my new netbook and dowloaded another installation package. I think I confused DropBox by unwittingly having two separate installations which it took as two networks of different files. I wound up with a system of two masters and one slave. DropBox wouldn't have bothered to compare their files any more than it would expect your files and my files to be similar.

[chris]

Funny you guys are mentioning mobile apps. Just listening earlier on the radio about that and they were saying how more people are on devices that they are forgetting to do routine maintenance to the PC and keeping all clean and updated (guilty as charged. I use to be so faithful)

Re: mobile and PC seems lately they are messing with my devices and my PC...Twitter being the worse and I keep getting mesages from them they changed my password. Or it says I need to change to a mobile version if I access from my device and then when I go on it on my PC its says someoen tried to access your account so we changed your password. It's getting to the point I haven't a clue what is what anymore. I thought it should not matter what you are on that a password is a password to log you in.