Friday, December 29, 2000
ARGH!
Here I am, working on my webpage, moving graphics around so that I don't have duplicates on my system, and while looking at my Insights page, I notice that the entry is from August! EEEK! The archives are okay, but the first page is not what I expected it to be! After checking code, and messing with Blogger, it seems that I have to just republish the last entry I made. *sigh*
I also added full URLs to my archive pages, so they'd be able to find certain links no matter where Blogger puts them. Hopefully, they will work, I haven't checked them.
So, unless you regularly read the archives, you think I've not posted since August. *sigh* Well, it's up-to-date now.
posted by ">DanaWheels
~*~ 12/29/2000 03:35:14 PM ~*~ link
Thursday, December 28, 2000
Computer Woes
I should know better, I really should. My husband and I got Windows Millenium from an uncle for Christmas, and I had heard that if you had Windows 98, you really didn't need to upgrade. Well, since it was given to us, I decided to upgrade my copy of Windows 98 SE. We run a dual-boot system and this way, if something went wrong, it wouldn't affect the ability for my husband to use the computer.
I installed Windows Me (the short name for Windows Millenium) onto my boot. It went fine until I noticed that the icons representing text files (normally a small notepad), had been changed to a different, totally unrelated icon. My husband, who knows more about Windows than I ever hope to know, said it was because of a corrupted registry. *sigh* I knew what that meant, it meant I had to reinstall everything after I formatted the harddisk, making it a clean install. Yuck. Not my most favorite things in the world to do.
I backed up all my files, and made sure that I had a directory on a drive that I could see even if I didn't have CD-Rom support installed. I made a Windows Start-up disk, and formatted the C: drive, and the D: (games) drive. Since I was doing a clean install, I would have to reinstall all programs, so I basically thought it'd be easy to format the D: drive instead of just deleting each directory separately.
I couldn't do that with the E: drive, as that's the drive that all my applications ran from, and is shared with my husband's boot setup. If I had formatted that drive, I would have screwed up his access to things like Microsoft Office, Paint Shop Pro, etc. So, I just deleted the directories for things that I only used, like Homesite (HTML editor), PageSage (Rubber Stamping database), CuteFTP, etc.
Okay, so I backed up my email (all 600 megs), and zipped it up, as I decided to just archive the email and start with a clean mailbox. THAT took a lot of time to compress using WinZip, and came out to 331 megs of email. *grin* I dumped that file to the partition that I have for burning things to CD (the partition is only big enough to hold one CD worth of data, an easy way for me to see if I have too many files for one CD), and searched for program files I'd need to install the many programs that I use everyday. After finding all the files either on my computer or on a CD, I copied them to a temporary directory to use in installing them once Windows Me was up and running.
I formatted the C: drive, and the D: drive. After that was all said and done, I installed Windows Me, and then I started installing all the software and such that I use.
I started with the printer drivers for the new printer we bought with Christmas money we'd gotten. We'd had an HP inkjet for oh, 5 years or so, and it was a wonderful printer, one of the really affordable (at that time) color inkjet printers. Well, a month or so ago, through one mishap or another, both cartridges for the ink (black and color) were dry or had the wrong ink refilled in them. It would cost about $30 to replace EACH cartridge. And we also have a Canon bubblejet printer that I'd bought for $20 used, so I could print out postage on my computer. For some reason, the software refused to talk to the HP inkjet. Well, THAT cartridge may have been bad from the start and it just showed up when it was empty. It was also $30 to replace. That's $90 to replace 3 ink cartridges. *sigh* Well, my DH (dear husband) was wondering around CompUSA and he saw a inkjet printer that prints photo quality for $120... that's only $30 more than buying cartridges alone. Well, we bought the printer, and yes, it's a lot better quality than the HP (it's a Lexmark), and it even has an on-screen graphic to tell you when the ink cartridges are getting low. It's pretty nifty. It prints in color, black, posters, banners, photo (using a special photo cartridge), and it does iron-ons.
Once the printer drivers were installed, I started installing software, well, I did something weird (and I'm not sure what), and really screwed up the computer, so here I had to reformat the drive and start over again. This time, I got it right, but it was TWELVE HOURS after I started this mess. *sigh* I still don't have ICQ installed yet, but most everything else is there.
I am making myself an "Oh, Shit!" CD (rewritable), so I can go in and recover fast if something should happen. Because we run 3 copies of Windows on this machine (one for me, one for my DH, and one to burn CDs on), we will always be able to get into the software to read the rewritable CD. This will save me from having to search all over the place for software, registration numbers, and passwords. *laugh*
posted by ">DanaWheels
~*~ 12/28/2000 08:41:41 PM ~*~ link
Tuesday, December 26, 2000
Holidays
Well, Christmas is already over, and we just have New Year's left. This year has gone by so fast, it's hard to believe. Either that, or it's that I'm getting older. *sigh* My DH and I had dinner with my birthmother, who is back in the Seattle area, after having moved from out of state. She's divorced and her ex has her two kids, that they adopted when they were married. I'm my mother's only child, as she had cancer when she was 21... yes, yes, she was very young when she had me.
We are friends, and do enjoy each other's company. She's working in retail right now, but will start Flight Training as a Flight Attendent for Alaska Airlines. I can't wait until she gets that job, as she's told them I'm her daughter, so I'll be able to fly free! :)
posted by ">DanaWheels
~*~ 12/26/2000 12:15:51 AM ~*~ link
My DH has finally gotten a job! He is a contractor working at Intel. This job hopefully will become permenant with Intel. When that happens, my DH will get benefits, a computer (for free), and other things. I'm really happy that he's found a job. It doesn't pay as much as his old jobs, but it's still more than minimum wage.
What with me working at H&R Block, and working as an ADA pre-litigation investigator, we'll finally be able to pay some bills and do things like travel!
posted by ">DanaWheels
~*~ 12/26/2000 12:13:18 AM ~*~ link
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