…on getting this system o’mine back to speed. It’s an HP 864N, and is about 6 months old, having purchased it new (actually, recertified) from TigerDirect.com in mid March.

I’ve been happy with the hardware, speed, and all the bells and whistles, but my oldest son managed to try to hide his ‘net tracks in mid May, and in so doing caused a full meltdown (complete reinstall of applications and operating system WITH reformat, as all that good stuff is on a separate partition on the big drive). Spent most of the summer trying to recover files with just about every file recovery tool known to man, and simply had so many things going on with THAT, that I didn’t get any real projects of mine done, save for one ( production of another CD Rom for my website). I’d hoped to get a lot more than that this summer.

Anyway, reinstalled the operating system last friday, after backing up the registry. Recovered in non-destruction mode (meaning NO reformat of the drive), and after a couple of days of CONSTANT rebooting, messing with some windows settings, reinstall of Office XP, Norton Internet Security with Live Update of EVERYTHING, reinstall of all spyware and firewall programs, and downloads of a few system fixing thing-a-ma-jiggers, as of today everything seems DONE.

Last thing I did this morning was start running Norton Utilities 2002 ( free with my purchase of N.I.S online last year) and run a full WinDoctor profile…it found about 1600 problems, about 1500 of which were bad .lnk files from my mirroring my laptop drive onto the big 160 gig main drive, as well as quite a few registry issues.

Everything I want to be running, accessable, and usuable is now there and ready…almost a week after starting to fix this darn thing…and NO LOST DATA this time.

Just wish that all those dang computer manufacturers out there STILL sent out a REAL operating system CD with every computer purchase. This would make is so much easier to fix OS problems when they occur, instead of having to run recovery software and risk loosing registration info, links, data, setups, configs, and who knows what else…

Now, my next guess for the NEXT needed full reinstall of windows xp pro media center edition on THIS computer? April 15, 2005…roughly.