What Year Is It?

Andy posed a good question in the comments of my last post. "What year is it in Iowa?"... I'll tell ya, at this point I'm not even sure. I just had to look to see what day it was. After working my buns off (don't I wish...they're no smaller - shaddup) trying to get my new work computer filled back up with data and programs (can you say, 14 hour days?) I was greeted yesterday morning to a black startup screen.

Black? YES.

Now, I know just enough about computers to be dangerous. I may experiment with various things on my personal computer if things go wrong, but the work computer? Nope. I turn chicken and go right to the office tech support people. I was able to get myself into "safe" mode. At that point the tech people wanted me to do a "restore". Well, gee... the most recent restore point was last Friday morning at 8 a.m. Against the rumblings of my gut, I ran it. It made no difference, except, of course, (you see this one coming) all the data that I'd entered in since then was gone. I'd be terribly surprised if you didn't hear the cussing several states away. Did it fix anything. No. I was so brave. I didn't even cry.

Now the tech support people had me run "spybot" and "ad-aware" and to defrag my hard drive. Spybot wanted some update that it couldn't get, so it wouldn't run. Ad-aware found 5 bland cookies, and I spent 2 hours running defrag.

Did it work? Yes. Why? No clue.

Now I call tech support to see if they can tell me why, as I do not want this to happen again. They have no clue. They say, "just keep re-booting periodically to make sure it's working". Helpful, aren't they? They tell me to call the tech support people for the major GPS software program I use (which was basically all I'd been using for day before, trying to restore and re-run previous data). That tech support person suggested I may have a lemon. He thinks I may have an unstable hard drive and/or something wrong with the motherboard and gee... I should contact my computer manufacterer to see if they can run some diagnostics.

I call the computer company. (I'm not naming names as they have always been good to me... and until it has been proven to me that it's junk, I'm not bad-mouthing them. They are not the same company as the computer that failed.) The computer tech support person (he spoke ENGLISH! Whoot!) tells me there is a 'fix' in Norton anti-virus version 10 and proceeds to have me change one setting and re-boot. He tells me this is going to take care of it. Huh. You mean, I could have avoided doing a "restore" and losing all my data?

I, and my company tech support people, are skeptical. However, my computer booted up this morning as though nothing was wrong (after spending all yesterday once more loading data back into my program).

One day soon, I hope, I may be back in the world of "normal" people. You know... the ones who work 8 hour days with a lunch break and who get to go home at 5 o'clock to see the people they love and cook supper and watch TV and play WoW and read friends' blogs... oh, yeah... that's called a LIFE, right? I vaguely remember. Keep your fingers crossed.