Father's Day
Topic: Family Days Out
Yesterday was Father's Day - my son's first. We all decided to have a day out and meet at Hampton Court Palace in Surrey. The original palace belonged to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, chief minister to Henry VIII, who lived in it for eleven years. He added hunting lodges for the King but eventually he was forced to hand the palace over to King Henry VIII in 1525. I went there as a child but the only real memory I had was of seeing the famous old grapevine. I went again when my children were around five and six with my sister - on that occasion we tried getting lost in the maze but didn't go into the Palace. (The maze was planted in 1690 and is 2 miles long, so you need plenty of time!) We had a lovely day together wandering round the gardens and the Palace, despite a drop of rain in the afternoon. We just managed to see everything and, because of Baby Andrew's pushchair, we were privileged to use the lift instead of climbing all the stairs to view Henry VIII's state apartments! Afterwards, we all visited my sister, who lives very near to Hampton Court.

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Zone Alarm
Topic: Computer
Delighted with the free version of Zone Alarm, which my son suggested I get. Amazing to see how many access attempts are being blocked! Went to a site called Shields Up yesterday, which I had bookmarked ages ago. I remember failing all the tests miserably. Anyway, this time, the results stated:

"Your system has achieved a perfect "TruStealth" rating. Not a single packet solicited or otherwise was received from your system as a result of our security probing tests. Your system ignored and refused to reply to repeated Pings (ICMP Echo Requests). From the standpoint of the passing probes of any hacker, this machine does not exist on the Internet. Some questionable personal security systems expose their users by attempting to "counter-probe the prober", thus revealing themselves. But your system wisely remained silent in every way. Very nice."

Posted by Noviomagus at 00:01 BST Post Comment | Permalink

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All Was Not Lost!
Topic: Computer
Been experiencing a problem or two with the new external drive/old drive. I had done a virus check as a precaution a while back. Decided to do a scan disk of E drive and lots of errors were found and some invisible files and folders were restored. Wish I had thought of doing that at the start - it would have saved me lots of time searching for copies of programs on the Internet, downloading a new Windows Media Player, etc., etc.! Pleased to get back all my fonts, games, screensavers and unzipped folders, which have all reappeared.

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How Daft Can You Be?
Topic: Computer
Solved the lack of colour in toolbars, scrollbars and 3d objects! First, I rediscovered how to customise the display properties then, eventually, it dawned on me that I had actually installed a 'Theme' some three years ago. I had completely forgotten about it and I feel particularly daft as I had carefully matched the Windows Media Player embedded in one of my old pages with that colour not realising that it was a 'local' colour scheme. Messed up my Encarta 2001. I had copied all the files over from the old external drive and stupidly deleted them. I must have left something behind though because, when I next wanted to use Encarta, the program reinstalled from the CD and the result is I have lost all of the updates I had downloaded.

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What A Headache!
Topic: Computer
Gradually progressing with restoring my computer. Found my old wallpaper so my desktop looks more familiar but the old colour is missing from toolbars and scrollbars, which are now a horrible grey. Got my printer working again. Found all the folders on the old drive but the printer driver was missing - had to reinstall from the HP disk. Also reinstalled my scanner and Canon ZoomBrowser from disk. Thank goodness, all the folders with my photos were intact but the driver for the camera can't be found so, I can't download photos via the usb - good job I have a pc card adapter. I finally found the folder for my Outlook Express address book and copied that over. Also discovered that Microsoft Works had not been reinstalled so now my spell checker is working again as OE shares that dictionary. However, a lot of files are missing from the old drive - System32 folder is virtually empty. The Bowep folder is gone so most of my games have gone too and others are missing .dll files. I have recreated Bowep and have managed to find quite a few of the old games on the internet. Not that I play them very often! When I had my first computer, a reconditioned ex-office laptop with no modem, I did get quite addicted to JezzBall! Mainly because someone commandeered the machine before I had had it ten minutes, got a good score and (so I was told) commented, "She won't top that!" or words to that effect. (I did!). Anyway, now I like WordZap and card games best when I want to wind down, no time to spend several hours on JezzBall!

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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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