Wednesday, September 30, 2009

a long story shortened...

the following was written in a microsoft works word processor, hence the uncharacteristic capitalization, which is an automatic feature...i wasnt going to do any "personal" blogging like what follows, but this time im making an exception...

hopefully, what ive been through will give you some thoughts about backing up your PC (if you dont already), because if i hadnt been able to reboot saturday night and back up my files, toolbars and links, i'd still be groping thru the cyber-darkness today...


By way of documenting what ive been through…

My PC crashed about 2 weeks ago and since I believed it was a bad monitor (it just went black) I went out and bought a new one…when I brought it home I tried rebooting one more time before replacing this 75 pound Trinitron picture tube (that im still using because there no place to move it to) and the system came up and seemed to run normally until this Saturday afternoon, when just after I had finished my weekly blog posting it crashed again…since I had managed to get it restarted two weeks prior, I spent two hours repeatedly trying to reboot, but never got past the opening screen that said DELL, which im told comes from the motherboard, hence the rebooting process wasn’t getting to the hard drive…I then used the F2 and F12 keys to reboot using an alternate path successfully, and immediately installed a flash drive which I had bought 4 months ago to back up my files that i had never used…I then spent over two hours moving everything (files, favorites, programs I had downloaded, etc) until I crashed again and further attempts to bring it back up that night were unsuccessful…however, I did get another one hour reprieve Sunday morning when I was able to finish backing up what I could, including screen shots of system elements that I would have difficulty remembering…

This PC I have been using since December was a gift from my nephews son when he upgraded to a better system, and I anticipated that it would eventually have to be replaced, so Sunday morning I went out to our rural Walmart (closest big store in 25 miles) where the selection was sparse; I could either buy an off-brand very similar to what I had (1GB & Windows XP) or upgrade to a 5GB HP pavilion with Vista, and 13 times the hard drive in my old PC (the intermediate step was only $100 less), and I opted for the upgrade…

Since Sunday, then, I have been transferring files from the flash to the new PC and downloading the programs I really need, and well as installing updates to the HP & Windows software that came with the system…I now have this system back to Internet Explorer 8 with five toolbars and even more accelerator add-ons than I had previously, and although ive still got more updates and programs to download (printer, camera, spy ware) I am at least back to functioning with 95% of my previous configuration.