Computer Problems Saga

For the past week I’ve been off-line because my hard-drive gave up the ghost. If somebody had told me that the strange, sort of clunking, sound it made when first starting up each day, and lasting for about 10 minutes, was a sign that it was on the way out I would have replaced it sooner. When it finally went to the land of hardware in the sky it was, of course, almost the weekend. So buying a replacement meant that I had to wait a few days for it to arrive as the weekend intervened with, of course, no deliveries. It finally arrived last Tuesday, and I began the task of installing it.

Now, I’m not in any way a “techie” but over the years I’ve managed to watch when my computer has had to have bits put in, or taken out, and I kept notes while I was watching. So I had a vague idea of what to do, and I read the label on the new drive very carefully before I began. But, being me, I found I’d bought the wrong type when it came to the connector. Luckily my machine was running on two drives and each was connected differently – one with an IDE and the other with a different sort of cable that just slotted into place. Eureka! It occurred to me to take out both of them and only use the new one. And anyway I’d bought a 160GB drive so it would easily replace my old two, both of which were 80GB ones. Unfortunately, I’d saved some data to the Slave drive, so I couldn’t get that back as I was now using its IDE to connect my new one. Never mind, I save data to CDs on a fairly regular basis, so I haven’t lost too much.

After the installation, and adding the OS I wanted to get to work, but I then found that neither of my CD readers would work. Again, I had two of those installed, so I had to take the Master out and revert the Slave back to being the Master. That took me a while as, with my poor eyesight, I couldn’t find the switch to change the settings. Eventually, it was done but now I found that the mouse wasn’t working properly as it refused to scroll smoothly, and I couldn’t hear my speakers. Suddenly it dawned on me that I’d forgotten to install the VIA drivers, and I read from my previous notes that those should have gone in before I added anything else back to the machine. I’d forgotten to do that, but I wasn’t going to start from scratch all over again so thought I’d take the chance of just adding them there and then. Hey Presto! It worked with no problems at all and I was able to control things properly again.

All of that took me quite a while as I'd never done anything like it before, and I now feel quite a sense of achievement having managed it. In fact one day in the not too distant future I’m going to build a whole new computer from scratch!

Personally, I always keep a note of the short-cuts on my desktop, the start-bar items, the add-ons, plug-ins etc: etc: And I regularly use the Belarc Advisor program to print out a profile of everything that’s on my computer. So I had to reinstall my software, some of which I had to get back from the web, and then redo my Bookmarks, and a few other things. When it was all back up and running I then found that my broadband connection kept dropping, and it took me quite a while to get that working properly – including another three installations to get rid of all the static on the phone line.

My final problem now is with Windows UpDate, which won't recognize the licence key as being genuine, which it is, therefore as it refuses to validate my copy of Windows I'm having to run things with just my good firewall and antivirus – neither of which come from Microsoft! But my computer does run in Stealth Mode so people can’t see when I’m on-line.

One moral of this saga is to always make a note of what you have on your computer long before it starts to crash. It’s taken me from last Tuesday morning until Saturday evening to get everything back exactly as I want it, and it’s been an exhausting time.

Naturally, I haven’t been able to keep up with some of the latest web stories, and I have to admit that I’m also having to give up on finding any more information about either the UFO damaging the wind turbine blade, or the weird creature seen here in Falmouth. If I happen to see any more stories about them I will post them, but to an extent I'm still playing catch-up, so I don't have the time to go looking.

I now hope that nothing goes wrong or I shall be starting all over again!