Climbing out of the abyss.....

Gee, seems like a year since I last posted here...

So, Ol' Bessie is back home, up and running, kinda sorta. Nothing like having a computer crash on New Year's Eve on a Sunday...

...like you have unlimited 'help' options for immediate service! I went to the good folks at Circuit City and their lime-green "Firedog" computer repair center. A young man by the name of Tyler took on what would be a 2-day ordeal of chasing unexplainable ghosts, defying the 'what should happens' left and right, and oft leaving very competent technical heads shaking in semi-disbelief.

Basically, my Windows XP files had been cremated and had to be rebuilt...that's the short version. Data has not yet been lost....though I have an external back-up hard drive, I had not updated it in about 4 months, so I stood to lose all the photos I've taken since then as well as all created documents and files.

Lesson #1: Back up your computer files regularly.

External hard drives that do this automatically and painlessly are quite affordable these days. Watch for weekly sales.

I use Sony. As with anything, them's them that love it, and them's them that hate it. I've been using Sony for many years because of the interconnectivity between their computers, cameras, video cams, etc., and their proprietary software I've gotten comfortable using. Sony also has a very low incidence of repair history...the shop rarely sees Sony towers come in, and to make a long story short had to use an HP-based XP repair disc to fix Windows...I still have some weird start-up screens and prompts that I may have to live with ('nuther long story short)...but in finally leaving the store at 6pm last night with Ol' Bessie, Tyler said "you might want to look up Webroot SpyTracker and run a check for spyware and stuff...your computer was strangely slow in a couple of spots..."

Nah, shouldn't have a big problem...I use Norton Symantec and some freebie spyware programs. However, I had upgraded my Yahoo! platform to a newer version, and noticed somewhere about that time that when I went to close out my last open window the screen would hang uncomfortably long before closing the window...mind you, by the time I got home and tried to put all back together and put it through its paces one quick time I was needing to go to sleep for today's shift. Went to webroot. Downloaded Webroot's free trial version. Did a 30-minute scan of my hard drives and, among other lesser things, found a Trojan Horse "downloader zlob" which is one nasty hombre to a computer system...while you never really know with computer issues, there is a chance such a creature crashed the system when I went to upgrade a lot of sealed factory software.

Lesson #2: There is no 'one', 'best', or certainly 'one best' anti-virus/spyware/adware system out there. Do not assume you are fully protected.

Third long story short, I run 2 protection systems now...worth my peace of mind for all the computer work I do.

I still have many tests to run and ripples to smooth out...I will tell you this system is running back at it's quick top-level best with the now 4-year old 3.2 P4 chip, 2G DDRRAM, new GE Force 7800 graphics card, and loads of hard drive space...so now need to get back to work for the day's easy forecast.

Oh, yeah, lest I forget:

Lesson #3: If you're moving to Colorado, invest in a serious snowblower.

Click to enlarge these graphics from the NWS office in Denver, separating and combining their 2 blizzards one week apart: