Brian's computer has been pretty sluggish for months. I don't know what the problem was, it would run quicker after running Crap Cleaner, but when you realize that all that’s on that computer is the weather station, the catcam and Brian’s photos and internet stuff, it shouldn’t run so poorly.
One of the problems, I’m sure is Norton Antivirus. I may have mentioned this before, but I don’t like Norton at all. I’ve run Trend Micro’s PCCillan for years on my computers, but Brian’s came with Norton and it was just easier to leave it. But I’d decided that the last Norton subscription renewal would indeed be the last. When it ran out, I fully expected to uninstall all of Norton and install PCCillan. As luck would have it, the last time I renewed PCCillan for my computer, it can now be installed on three systems for the price of one. I’ve already installed it on the laptop and my desktop, the last computer to do was Brian’s.
Well, he started getting these popups telling him that it was almost time to renew Norton and I figured ‘what the hell’ and thought it shouldn’t take all that long to reformat his computer, get rid of all of the bloat on it and set it back up. I figured a couple of hours, tops. I started around noon yesterday.
I finished at 12:30 last night. Well, I actually finished this morning, I had to reinstall a couple of programs. And I’m not sure if he’s got audio. I’ll check that later, but it’s not a real big deal. See, I couldn’t find the drivers disk. *sigh* So, I downloaded as many as I could find from the Dell website.
I did find out that if you want to reformat the hard drive with Windows, you need to do this when you start up the computer with the CD in the CD drive. You cannot reformat a hard drive that you started after Windows has loaded up, from the “run” box. *lol* I know this for a fact because I tried it yesterday.
Twice.
I did have a very, very scary moment. Have you ever seen the movie “Maverick” with Mel Gibson? If so, remember the part where he’s visiting with Joseph (Graham Greene) and Joseph says that he’s never seen that much money, could he see it and Brett gets the money out and hands it to him and Joseph looks through the stack and says ‘is this supposed to be some kind of joke?’ because it wasn’t money, but stacks of just paper. Brett takes it from him, fans through it and looks like he’s going to pass out. He falls to the ground, mumbling something about Annabella.
I knew that feeling last night. I almost threw up.
Brian’s pictures, almost a thousand of them, were not on the CD. The CD where I’d saved them. And they weren’t in the folder on my hard drive that I’d originally transferred them to, before moving them to the CD. The CD that they were not on. Brian was out on the couch and I went and told him. He said “oh, well” and went to bed. I could tell he was a little upset.
I ran an undelete on the CD and it was if they’d never existed. The folder “Brian’s photos” was there, but nothing was in it. I started the undelete about 10:30 on the hard drive where I’d save them. It was supposed to take about four hours. Then I started a search of my system for jpg images while the undelete program was running.
I watched the images load up and there were some I didn’t recognize. Then I did. They were Brian’s pictures! I found where they were and there they were. All of them, every single last one. I copied them to the CD and made sure they were there, then reinstalled those on Brian’s computer. After searching for over an hour, it took less than ten minutes to get them on CD and back onto his computer.
And this morning, he’s on the computer and said it’s a lot faster. I did lose all of his bookmarks. I exported them and I guess they weren’t in the folder that I exported from. I never even thought to check that, I thought they went to the default, but I was wrong.
But bookmarks can be replaced. Deleted, lost photos cannot.
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