Any Thunderbird experts on here?

somehow I managed to find her inbox, sent and saved folders. Finally fixed that.

Now if I can figure out why it's not sending messages.

Good call on the driver, could also be a loose plug. On laptops, they plug in the wiring connections from the screen portion to the CPU part of the assembly. On HP's, for whatever reason, it is not a locking plug and can work loose.

I had a screen go out, and after accidentally dropping the laptop it started working again. A week later it went out again, so I took it into Best Buy and let the resident geek take a shot. He had it fixed in about 5 minutes, knew exactly what to look for.

my daughter's Dell laptop had the plug come loose. There is a cover I took off and reseated the the monitor cable.

I discounted that because the screen is lit up but I'll give it a shot anyway.

I finally fixed the send part of wife's Thunderbird. it is supposed to be username@email.net not just username in a box in the settings. They have so many places to enter things it takes hours to find them all and make sure they are correct. This is why I gave up on e-mail clients. And the other thing is the e-mail server owners just decide to change server names one day so you are pulling your hair out trying to figure out why your e-mail isn't working. That's why I gave up and just started using web interface. But she saves e-mails on her computer. I'm glad I got it going again.

I have an elderly Vaio that had flawless hard ware, but driver, registry, and other issues started to creep up.

The great thing about the Vaio (& a lot of laptops are this way), is that you can do a complete hard drive re-image to factory condition (by pressing F11 during boot on the Vaio). I did this uninstalled the bloat ware and let it update for about an hour. It once again performs like a champ.

Of course this completely erases everything, so.....

The computer is an hp zd7000 17". I purchased it about 6 or 7 years ago manufacturer rebuilt (not new).

The issue is there is no sound and the video is all white. I can hook it up to a monitor and get video.

Apparently the all white video is a common hp problem according to some internet searching. It's hard to tell but it seems like the solution is hp needs to fix it which is not likely on a computer that old. I guess I'm lucky I got all these years out of the computer because people are complaining about hp computers doing it after less than a year and having to make hp fix it under warranty.

Everything is intact so I'm not sure what I'll do at this point. I have this 15" 4.5 year old hp laptop still working. Side business is dead so it isn't that big a deal right now.

> This is why I gave up on e-mail clients...That's why I gave up and just started using web interface.

I depend pretty heavily on e-mail for both business and personal matters, so I like having my mail stored locally in case something goes wrong with the cloud. However, I also like the ability to check mail when I'm away from my office, so I have the server forward all of it to my Gmail account, too. Best of both worlds.

My work e-mail uses Outlook and has an on-line interface. Both are identical so it works fine and someone else (IT) has to make it work.

> My work e-mail uses Outlook and has an on-line interface.

Outlook is a Microsoft-branded virus that comes with a host of system vulnerabilities. I use T-bird for that very reason. Well, that and the fact that I don't like Microsoft.

somehow last night I got Thunderbird working last night. I managed to get it to open its own files. The key is to copy the files from the old location and overwrite the new location. Although you can point Thunderbird elsewhere there is a configuration file that would need to be manually edited so pointing Thunderbird to where the files are located is kind of futile without either putting the files where the configuration file expects to find them (despite the settings dialog) or manually editing the config file.

The refusal to send e-mails (receiving worked) turned out to be one of the dozens of boxes with the e-mail in it had the username but not the @domain part of the address so that finally fixed the failure to send. There is problems with Thunderbird's automatic setup, it doesn't work. You have to stop it and manually enter the addresses and make sure it's the correct e-mail type (it defaults to IMAP but I need it to be POP).

> Outlook is a Microsoft-branded virus ...

love it! (no, Not Outlook)

I now know more about Thunderbird then I ever wanted to. How do I push all that stuff out of my brain now?

> I depend pretty heavily on e-mail for both business and personal matters, so I like having my mail stored locally in case something goes wrong with the cloud. However, I also like the ability to check mail when I'm away from my office, so I have the server forward all of it to my Gmail account, too. Best of both worlds.

I would probably have it all go to Gmail and then set my email client to download from there. Just a suggestion, however. 🙂

I just noticed Wendell's avatar LOL.

I guess I can make the 17" laptop a file server since the HD still works.

> I would probably have it all go to Gmail and then set my email client to download from there.

Google is a huge corporation. To date they've been pretty good about providing free service like Gmail with reasonable privacy policies and a good uptime record, but I wouldn't want to depend on them to continue doing so. My ISP, on the other hand, is a local company that partners with a local 501(c)(3) for the provision of e-mail services. I know the owner of the ISP, and I've been an officer of the non-profit for 16 years. Their combined services have had an excellent service record for more years than Google's been in existence. I have much more faith in (and control over) the local operation than I do in Google, so using Google as the backup makes a lot more sense for me.