I’m feeling more relaxed right now than I have in months. I don’t know why.
Maybe because I was stressing myself about redoing the old Dell and knowing that I had to do something about the Gateway.
Yesterday, I didn’t reformat the Dell’s hard drive, but I did the repair. And it helped so much. Even after all the work I did two weekends ago and the phone calls to tech support, things still weren’t working as they should. The system wasn’t reading the CD drive, I couldn’t access the information on the external drive that holds my pictures and movies from any program except My Computer. It just wasn’t right.
So, I did that repair and got all of the service updates from Microsoft and Dell. I got the newest BIOS from the Dell site and got that installed. Where it wasn’t seeing the USB 2.0 card I installed within the past couple years as 2.0, it now does. So, the external drives are zipping along nicely. I still had problems with one of the external drives, so I moved the information I wanted to save (the pictures) over to the other external drive. It took almost twenty four hours to do this. It shouldn’t have taken that long. After I had the repair done and the Windows service packs and fixes downloaded and installed, I formatted that slow external hard drive. Then I started the transfer of the information back to it.
It took less than an hour.
Amazing.
Then, I realize the Gateway, the camera computer had frozen early yesterday morning. I restarted it as soon as I noticed this. Within hours, it was frozen again. Very, very annoying. It got so bad that it wouldn’t even boot up completely. After the fourth time of it just hanging, I’d had it.
Since the Dell was running smoothly, I figured I’d do some tweaking on the Gateway. First I removed a bunch of programs that I’m never going to use. Then I removed all of the exteraneous files, like the temporary internet files, unneeded back up files, things like that.
Then I ran the Registry Mechanic from PCTools. It found many errors during the deep scan of the system and it fixed them all. Then, I booted up. It came right up. As it did again this morning.
Now both computers are running without a hitch and it’s a load off of my mind.
Another thing that was bothering me was the archives of the catcam images. I wasn’t getting to them every day and by not getting to them every day, they were just piling up. I figured the hell with it. I changed the camera settings on all cameras to not save them. And I deleted all of the saved pictures from the computers. There were over twenty thousand since I last did anything with them. I just don’t have the time to look at them every day. I just don’t have it. If I see one that catches my fancy, I’ll save it manually, but no more auto save. No more of that “I really need to look at those”. As much as I like the idea, it just wasn’t practical.
I think maybe that’s why I’m feeling more relaxed now.
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