Laptop Labours

Not what I had in mind for Friday!  I had all kinds of problems yesterday morning with the laptop and kept getting messages that it had run out of RAM memory.  I like to try to figure things out myself, but I finally gave up and called Apple support.  I started out with one techie and spent about an hour with her.  First thing we did was back up the laptop onto an external hard drive (which I should have done already, so that was a positive).  While that was working away, I told her that I was having the same issues with my desktop, so she suggested reinstalling Sierra to see if that fixed the problem.  A message came up saying it would take about 5 minutes.  Back to the laptop, and it was taking awhile to back up, so she said she would call back in about half an hour.  I asked her if it would be her I'd be talking to again and she said it would be.  About 50 minutes later, I got a call - from a different person.  Had to explain the problem over again, then about 10 minutes into the call, the line went dead.  I called back and got a third person and explained everything for the third time.  She gave all kinds of suggestions but nothing helped, so she turned me over to a senior techie, Jackie (a good sign, I reckoned), who was amazing.  She hadn't heard of the problems being caused by the latest security update to Sierra, which I thought may have caused them.  She did whatever they do to see the computer too and led me through all kinds of steps to try to figure out the problems.  I learned a few tricks along the way.  Finally she managed to come up with a solution:  delete everything in the Safari folder except the bookmarks.  The problems were definitely with Safari, but she had no idea what was causing them and made all kinds of notes to discuss with her colleagues.  Anyway, she was extremely helpful and gave me her phone number and extension to call back on Monday if I had more problems.  This was nearly 5 hours after my initial call.  When I told her about the desktop and the reinstallation of Sierra, which had by now taken hours, she said that's not unusual on a "vintage" computer, and again told me to call if the reinstallation didn't solve things. 
I left the desktop and the reinstallation, made and ate supper, went back to check - and it was still going on.  Finally, about 8 hours after starting, Sierra was reinstalled.  I didn't feel like testing things out at that point.  All seems fine this morning after I did a couple of things that I'd done with her on the laptop.  A "vintage" computer.  Huh.  It has been running slowly but I need it to hang on for awhile yet!
So another possible entry for Red, featured on our fixed laptop.  :))