Much better, thank you very much

Okay, after the frustration and anger of yesterday morning--and the Howard Beale "enough is enough" turnaround midmorning--things seem to be going a bit better.

1) Working at home today. Low number of emails and a major issue I was involved in was resolved last night by the time I left.
2) Stopped by Staples on the way home to buy Norton 360 and do some major cleaning. If this doesn't work, then I fear I'm going to have to do a hard drive reformat, but at least I have backup now.
3) It is NICE out there today!
4) I currently have Streets of San Francisco on in the background and it's amusing the hell out of me. Very amusing to respond with "Hey, I know where that is" as well as "Hey, that's not there anymore." :p

More soon!

[PC] Phoenix to the Flame

(yes, head58, that was a Sinead O'Connor reference. ;) )

Okay.

Well, I've run all the programs I could run.

I've scanned everything I could scan.

I even bought new scanning software to use for said scanning.

Nothing.

NOTHING.

Still the same status...slow as hell, hanging/crashing apps, can't get to the McAfee website, scanning doesn't find anything...


Yep, looks like another hard drive do-over is in order. The second one in how many months? I'll have to check.

I'm not as frustrated as I was before, since it wasn't something stupid like a missing driver that wasn't playing nice. No, this was something, probably due to some internet stupidity on my behalf (who knows what, though...). Not much else I can do at this point.

*sigh*

Well, at least I have everything available at this point. I have all the software I need. I can download the rest from the websites.

I have no idea what to do if reformatting the hard drive doesn't work. Maybe a new PC. Shit...not that I want to do that, but if I have to...

This Gateway has been really good all this time, I've had very little problems with it, at least up until the last few months, when I noticed things were starting to get slower. At first I thought it might have been the number of things I had on there (A good couple dozen programs, but none of them constantly in use except maybe Media Monkey and IE, and I make sure to keep them from running silently when they're not on), but I don't think that's it.

---------

As an aside, I've had this PC since April 2006--that's just a hair over 3 years. That's about the same time that I had the Dell, from mid-2003 up to then. This seems to be the norm for me, that three years seems to be the limit for the PCs I have before they start crapping out on me. Of course, emmalyon's laptops seem to work with little to no problem and she's had them for much longer, but then again she doesn't use them nearly as much as I use my PC, put them through nearly as much abuse as I do (cd ripping, downloading, writing, internetting, audio work, photo work, etc.). At this point I'm pretty sure when I look for another PC in the future, I'll make sure to find one that can handle that much stress. Perhaps something with extra oomph to make it go faster. Something with a lot of memory, both real and virtual.

Any suggestions/comments on that of course are welcome. ;)

[PC] Rising Up from the Ashes

Yup, it worked. Did a complete restore of the hard drive, and things are faster, cleaner, and easier to use again! YAY!

Also: even though I feel I may be wasting a bit of money because my McAfee subscription renewed itself at the end of last year, I went with Norton 360...got it on sale at Staples the other day, and it looks like it might have a little more on the ball than McAfee, which I always seemed to have issues with.

More later...I now have all sorts of stuff to reinstall... :p