A Disaster!
Topic: Computer
Well, the worst happened and I crashed my computer on 18th April! I hope I never go through that experience again! NEVER try to replace user.exe with a different one! I now know that it is unique to each computer. Thankfully, I found an excellent local repair man at Black Cat PC Computer Solutions in Bognor Regis. He went to a lot of trouble to restore as much as possible. Thank goodness all my web pages are there as I didn't have a backup of some unpublished pages and my recent amendments! He also installed a much larger hard disk and put the old one into an external drive so that I could access what remained of my old files. So far, I have managed to restore MailWasher, Paint Shop Pro and PestPatrol, also reinstalled Internet Explorer 6. Can't seem to restore the emails for my separate identities but got some back for my main identity minus all the 'Rules' which have gone. My Address Book is missing too and the spell checker is not working. Just to complicate things, Freeserve (my ISP) has just changed its name to Wanadoo. Seem to have lost all my games, downloaded fonts and screen savers, Windows Media Player and my recently updated WinZip9. Hope I can find my registration code somewhere! Could be much worse.

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Getting Frustrated
Topic: Computer
Found another unwanted file today, 'VegasRed.exe', which had arrived on 5th April. Assume it is also part of my recent hijacking. Having trouble with a file called 'wapicc' which is 'not responding' every time I have a computer hang. Something to do with the dial-up connection box. Now getting very frustrated when I try to work on my website pages on my computer. Whenever I try to click on 'Edit', 'Refresh' or 'x' to close the page, my cursor is jumping about uncontrollably and I have to resort to Ctr-Alt-Del. Ran a system file check and I have three files "which may be corrupted". user.exe, setupx.dll and Lfkodak.dll. Should be restored from installation disk but the instructions tell me to insert the disk, switch off computer and switch on again, which I can't do because my on/off button has been broken for ages. Found copies of the two .dll files on the internet, so have restored those.

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I've Been Hijacked!
Topic: Computer
Well, I've learnt the hard way that having a virus checker is not enough protection! Discovered I had a 'Startpage' virus, various trojans and about 325 spyware and adware parasites. No wonder I kept running out of disk space. Various new unwanted files started appearing on my desktop [silent.exe, bs5-nt15v.exe, CS4PO28.exe, 0021-bd194126.exe, o.bat and 0]. Tried to manually delete these except for CS4P028.exe, which was 'in use'. Didn't take long for everthing to reappear. Then a 'WhenUSearch' toolbar installed itself. Finally managed to get rid of this via Add/Remove programs - but only after I had filled in a 'why are you deleting this program' form. Told them in no uncertain terms that 'it had installed without my agreement and with loads of parasites'! My son pointed me in the direction of a very good program called Pest Patrol.

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Mother's Day
Topic: Family Days Out
It was "Mother's Day" in England, yesterday. Went over to my daughter's for lunch and my son came down too. Of course, it was her day as well so the two generations of Mums had a double celebration with all the offspring. Shelley and baby Andrew went to visit her Mum - can't have everything! Had a lovely day and got a beautiful oasis of flowers. Really lucky to have two superb grown-up kids!

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Ten Weeks Old
Topic: Grandchildren
My son sent me this superb photograph of Andrew, yesterday. He now weighs 12lbs 5ozs and has caught a little cold! However, he seems to be a strong little chap. He can turn over from his front to his back and keeps trying to sit up! Still lots of disrupted nights for his Mum and Dad, who are being kept pretty busy! Very grateful to David for taking the time to keep viewing my draft home page and pass on his thoughts and opinions.

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The Work of the Devil?
Topic: Terrorism
What terrible events in Madrid this morning with nearly 200 people killed by the bombs left in commuter trains. My sister and her children and grandchildren live in Madrid, so I feel closer to the Spanish people in their grief. What on earth makes a human being become a terrorist? A war I can understand but to target people indiscrimately by blowing up anyone unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time seems to me to be the work of the Devil.

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Have a Chuckle!
Mood:  silly
Topic: Miscellanea
Hubby heard this on the radio today. Go to Google and type in 'Weapons of mass destruction'. Click on 'I'm Feeling Lucky'. Smile - You'll get a funny 404 error page! If you follow the links, don't spend too much money!

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Redesigning My Home Page
Topic: My Web Pages
Finally managed to get back to working on my web pages last week. What with yet another horrible chesty cold in February, plus my back injury, I hadn't done any real work on my computer since 19th December 2003! Trying to redesign my front page in line with the suggestions from Practical Internet Web Designer magazine. Removing most of the distracting animations and trying to tone down the backgrounds! When I first started writing web pages, I used 'tables' as boxes to hold everything together and to keep images where I wanted them so I think I will have to keep those. Also, used <td>s to create double borders. However, trying to get rid of some of the 'tables' inside 'tables' and use more cascading style sheets. Gradually getting my head round more of the intricacies of css but my old brain is aching!

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A Strange Dream
Topic: Miscellanea
Had a very strange dream about a futuristic airshow going on over our back garden! Lots of strange aircraft passing by in formation - some really huge. Very interesting. I think I must be watching too many episodes of "Stargate SG1"! (It's a great show!).

And How To Keep Your Customers Happy
Never did get a reply from Freecom about my Traveller. After a week, I emailed them again to say I would appreciate an answer. Got a reply very quickly asking me to resend the original information. Wrote again on 11th. Given up now. Very rude of them not to reply, it would have only taken a couple of minutes or less to send a email saying 'sorry, unable to replace your machine as out of guarantee'.

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Problem with Identities
Topic: Computer
More computer problems. Since Thursday, couldn't download any emails to my Inbox although I could view them on MailWasher! Also too many spam emails not bouncing back because of false addresses. It occurred to me that all this bouncing doubles the problem of spam clogging the airwaves or whatever they are and I wondered if my account might have been locked because of all the returning spam. Also, I think the bouncing caused at least two emails I know of, both from family, to be returned to sender marked 'unable to deliver'. Will set MailWasher to just delete. Should really replace my laptop. The on/off switch broke in the summer of 2002 and I use the 'Quick Launch' button to switch on. This means that each time the computer hangs, I have to resort to poking the little hole on the side of the machine to reboot. Anyway, I digress. Noticed that the boxes for incoming and outgoing mail were greyed out on Account Properties so tried creating a new account only to get a message telling me my password was wrong. (It wasn't). So, Saturday rang Freeserve Customer Support. Everything working now except my identity now downloads mail sent to my husband's identity. I'm now putting the blame on Freeserve. I think they must have changed things on the server because my old system of sorting mail to different identities (by putting "-john:-grandpa:+myusername" on my identity) no longer works. So, it was probably that filter system which suddenly stopped any mail downloading to my side.

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