Sweet Catastrophe

So when it came to it, Ryan couldn’t fix it, and the computer guy we were planning on taking it to owns his own little business and he’s out this week. So it was time for the dreaded reformat.

I had already taken off everything I just had to have, so I sat and thought about it and just told Ryan to go ahead and do it without me double-checking. I figured, if it was important enough, I got it the first time and if I looked again, I’d just be reminded of everything I was about to wipe out.

Now I’m back, enjoying the challenge of re-organizing and checking for any major losses that I need to recoup. Things look a little different; I explained to Ryan that I keep my Windows set up with Classic Menus so he set it to Performance Mode (forgive me if I’m remembering that wrong) so everything pretty much has the classic look already and it takes less RAM….or something to that effect–anyway so visually some of my fonts and graphics and stuff look a little different, but it won’t take long to get used to them.

All in all, I’m okay with it. I lost some things I’ll probably never even remember I had, and some things I know I’ll have to work to get back, and I already am, but I’m cool with a fresh start. I had a lot of stuff I was ready to wipe out anyway, so this way I had no choice.

One of my biggest annoyances has actually been with Firefox. They’ve done away with some of the plugins I frequently used (or at least hidden them in another dimension…) and also changed their setup for the search engine manager (if you have it, it probably sits in your top right corner, defaulted to Google) so I can’t add back some of the ones I used more frequently. Changes, changes.

Soon we’re gonna add another hard drive to my computer. The system and any installed programs will run off one hard drive,  all of my files and everything will be on another. This way, in about 99% of possible situations, if I get a virus I can just reformat the hard drive containing the operating system.

It’s something BJ’s in the process of doing (or maybe just finished…) for Brittany’s computer and I think it’s a perfect idea. Once Ryan’s computer guy is back in town, Ryan will be taking his in to fix a heat sensor and I’ll probably have him go ahead and look into what kind of deals we can get on that extra hard drive.

Barring that, I’m getting an external with a TeraByte…I can’t stop drooling over the idea of that!