2000: The
Melody Lingers On
IN MY OPINION
Books Read in 2007 "Aunt
Mel, Part 1"
Flash
version here My Favorite Video Blogs Missbehavens (for others, see Links page)
The Zimmers Wizard of Oz--Alternate Ending Phil Donahue vs. Bill O'Reilly Drunk Driving Test Steve Irwin Meets Ross the Intern Volcanic Eruption 4/2/07 Polar Bear Cub
Family Stories Vlog New on My
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"TWO TRAINS...." 4 May 2007
You just know that a question like this is going to put me in the fetal position sucking my thumb. I've talked about my blind spot where it comes to math before. Well, that's kind of what discussing the inner workings of a computer does to me too. A glaze comes over my eyes. I see programming language (other than HTML programming, of course) and become comatose. Look...I don't want to do anything complicated. I want to upload my little pictures and write my little journal and make my silly little videos and write my little e-mails. All you geeks can muck around with the stuff that makes a computer ... you know .... a computer. Basically I just want a glorified typewriter. That said, there is potential hope on the horizon. My dearest friend Steve, bless his heart, who has the patience of Job, has had two good chats with me about my computer problem. A lovely woman named Helen signed my guestbook and suggested a system restore, which I had already done, but after talking with Steve the first time, I decided to actually, you know, do something. First, I ordered an external hard drive so that when the inevitable re-install of XP occurred, I would just start keeping all my files on the external hard drive and I wouldn't have to go through all this hell of trying to decide what had and hadn't been backed up and what I needed and didn't need. Then, after thinking about Helen's suggestion, I did a second system restore and instead of just setting it back a month, I set it back 3 months. After I did that, I worked on the computer for several hours last night without any problem whatsoever. I hardly dared hope that the system restore had actually solved the problem. Steve called again this morning and told me to dump Norton AntiVirus and to download a program called Avast, which is free for home computers, and to run that, along with the Ad-aware that I was also running. He also told me to upgrade my Internet Explorer, even though I never use it, because the latest version is better at catching spyware. I installed the new Internet Explorer. I downloaded Avast and did a scan of my hard drives. It took about 3 hours and I was panicking the entire time because I had chosen to delete infected files and after the thing started, I realized I could have opted to repair them and I didn't know if I was screwing up things by deleting important files.
For 3 hours, I watched as the computer screen deleted a seemingly endless list of files that were infected with a Trojan virus or a host of other viruses I'd never heard of. I thought that when the scan ended there would be some sort of report or something, but the screen just went black. Had something happened? I watched the black screen for a long time and then moved the mouse just a tad and suddenly up popped the log-in screen. OK. Here it was. The moment of truth. What would happen when I logged on? Ta-da! There was my wallpaper. There were the desktop icons. There was a thing from Avast asking me to register it. All looked just fine. But is it? I don't know. All I know is that for now, I'm not having any of the problems that have plagued me for weeks, and driven me bonkers for the past several days. For now, everything seems to be OK. But I've definitely learned a lesson. The backing up continues, the organization continues and when the inevitable day arrives when XP will have to be re-installed, it won't be quite the catastrophe that it would have been earlier this week. |
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PHOTO OF THE DAY
photo by Peggy.
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This is entry #2591
