After the machine crashed I contacted several local computer repairers from the phone directory. The first to assist was DSA Computers from just up the road. Dave the technician didn’t want to waste my money and recognized how badly I was struggling. He gave me a bunch of things to try before calling him again. The machine decided to play difficult. It would come on at night and then refuse to start the next day. It didn’t start over the entire weekend and just before I went to phone DSA for assistance it kicked back on. Dave suggested I remove the RAM and the graphics card and clean the slots out.

I cleaned the slots with a tooth brush, scraped the fans and cleaned the cooling fins on the graphics card and cpu heat sinks with pipe cleaners and cotton buds. The gold connections on the cards were cleaned by being polished with some printer paper. All new to me! Unfortunately the drive had decided to scatter windows all over the place because the machine was being cold booted so much and now that it was kinda working the windows start up just kept recycling without actually opening up.

Dave from DSA was unavailable and I was getting desperate so I had a look in the book and called  Ken Farlow from Cornerstone Computer Connections. He couldn’t come until Thurs and it was Wed at the time. He arrived on time and spent some time trying to get windows to self repair. He also recognized my bad financial position and would have fixed it and left without a bill right there I think. He couldn’t fix it and took the machine off saying he would probably not be finished until Wednesday next. I hated that but of course all his regulars and bigger business customers are trying to get things done by Easter!.

He rang back on Tuesday and went over the files he had been able to save. He spent some considerable amount of time working through the crashed drive as well as repartitioning the drive and reloading Windows again. He didn’t understand why I was so disappointed that he had worked to save my Internet Explorer bookmarks rather than the ones for Firefox but I had over 200 on Firefox and do not use IE at all. That wasn’t his fault. There were a few things I had not known to mention. He worked really hard to save my email account settings and got my primary accounts up as soon as he brought the machine back on Thurs afternoon.

He has special prices for elderly and disabled and charged me almost nothing for a very large amount of work. He saved a lot of things I really needed to at least start rebuilding the software again and put new security software on as well. If I had let him he would have spent a lot of time here on the Thurs before Easter but I cannot remember what I am doing without my hands on the keyboard and just wanted to get back into it. I was very pleased with myself when I discovered that the emails were on the backup. I had changed the message save file to my document backup file and so they were all there both on the backup drive and among the things Ken managed to save. With just a little more work this may be a lot less painful next time although I AM unwell and I really did my best already

Lots of programs need replacing and some cannot be replaced as their sites have closed down. I have been on here for hours and am a bit worried that I am crashing into depression and that is a sign I have overdone it as well. It is not only that. For some reason all the loneliness I have put behind me and have not suffered from in some time seems to be back. I guess all the stuff I put in the machine just allowed me to bury myself in making images and now I am blocked. It is an immense depression. Far worse than I would have expected to have dealt with at this point in my life.

I could not get back to the control panel for the domains I own because both the email account and bookmarks were gone. I was worried that Unlimited Space customer service would not answer me so late on the night before Easter holidays. They reset my domain passes and sent me the email almost immediately. I have been with them a long time and have yet to have them fail me. The emails were back up in moments and the domain access and websites all running strong. I noticed the Weblight Studio backyard spiders is almost the highest rated backyard spiders on Google search engine. That makes me feel good about all those years of research and site design I put into that one

While the computer was offline, my mate Mick, offered an old TV and set top box to fill some time for me. He insisted so much and I got tired of books and the radio so I accepted. I do not actually enjoy television for the most part I have discovered. Its alright to have on as a window while I work on something else but as the only form of entertainment it really sucks. It sucked further because there is some form of regular interference here. About every 30 or 45 seconds there is a burst of interference that makes the digital television go crappy and noisy and even lose the signal. Bloody annoying! I checked next door flat and it happens to her as well. Still cannot get digital ABC either. I turned all the appliances off in case it was one of them but there is exactly the same interference on the radio both here and in the next door flat

Next door is actually very upset about the interference. She has a rough trot lately and like all of us just seems to be at the end of one problem after another with nothing actually running smoothly. I points at my computer if you are wondering why I would be complaining

29 April….. As I work my way through  installing all the software I need I am constantly struck by the amount of work Ken has done towards preserving my settings and other essential information. He looked after me very well.

Today I was installing some RAM. During the breakdown I discovered that I have dual channel memory architecture and rather than a single memory card there should be two the same. Very simply it is the best configuration and doubles the speeds between the memory and the cpu. So my  2G Ram should have been 2 x 1G to get the best results. Now it is 2 x 2G. Ken discussed this with me at the time and gave me advice on setting that up. Today, when there was some doubt as to which configuration gave dual channel and which gave 4G at the single channel speed Ken emailed me with a link to some software that would test it. Days after he had signed off on the job. That was a big help to me and I appreciate it so it is here. Now you know as well!