Saturday, May 29, 2010

At last, mostly, sort of...

(initially written last week, updated and posted on June 6 after returning from a week on the road)

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At last. I now have a working computer again - mostly...

At last, I now have my work restored - mostly...

And at last, I have again started to write again. - sort of...


My whole epic started about this time last week when I was starting to plink away on The Fifth Key. I got a Norton warning indicating that I needed to upgrade my antivirus - and my understanding is that there are presently several doozies of viruses out there. When I started to click on the OK key, I found a menu item prompting me to upgrade from my version 3 to version 4 - foir free. So I did - big mistake...


The install failed. So I tried to roll back to my old version.

That failed, too.

Finally, I uninstalled everything Norton-related and tried again - still no luck...

So finally I called the help line to Symantec. I got thru to one of their technicians, a wonderful lady in the Phillipines who walked me through another round of uninstalls.
Well - we finally got back to the point where all of the past Norton stuff had been removed. I then tried to re-install my old version of Norton 360. Again, no dice.

TO make a long story short, at that point my internet connection gave up the ghost. It turns out that several functions that live on that corner of the motherboard of my old laptop were becoming a bit spotty - my battery connection to name one. Well, I guess this included the ethernet connection, which finally died - right in the middle of the download.

End result, no more network connection. I now had a standalone PC which was rapidly fading into the sunset. So the rest of the next day was spent moving data off of the disk (fortunately, I had been reasonably faithful about backups) and listing out which apps I really cared about. Then it was time to go out laptop shopping.

Well, the rest is history. As I write this, pretty much everything is back up and running - with the exception of my website maintenance. Unfortunately, my site is a week or two out of date, and I noted several links don't work. Also unfortunately, Frontpage 2003 doesn't work very well on my new machine - so until I get Frontpage updated (or replaced) that will remain a bit of a headache. Guess what tomorrow's project is... :-)

Still, things are at last working again - mostly, anyway
...well, sort of...