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 Thank goodness all my web pages are there as I didn't have a backup of some unpublished pages and my recent amendments!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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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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Rang the Support Hotline
Topic: Computer
Well, I have spent a few days uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers for the Freecom Traveller CD Writer; uninstalled and reinstalled Easy CD and Direct CD. Downloaded a new driver from the Freecom Website and tried that. Tried a complete uninstall using Add/Remove Programs and reinstalled the driver and the software. All to no avail. Lost count of the number of reboots! So, yesterday, I rang the Support Hotline. Went through exactly the same procedure of adding and removing drivers, etc., etc.! The Technician eventualy decided that the problem was the Traveller itself and not the driver. "We no longer repair these units. How long have you had it?". I explained that the Traveller was a present (from my son and my daughter for my 60th birthday) and that my son had installed it on my computer exactly two years and one day before all this happened. Did I have the receipt? I didn't - I told 'Will' that I thought it likely that my son had bought it in December 2001. Emailed David. Yes, he had the receipt, he bought it on 7th December 2001. Rang Technician Will again: "Send us an email explaining everything as I don't have the authority to give you a replacement and I will have to pass it on to my manager". He seemed quite hopeful. Fingers crossed.

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Problems with CD Writer
Topic: Computer
Aaaarrrggggh! Been having trouble with the computer hanging a lot recently and going into "Safe Mode" and now I seem to have trashed my external cd writer. I was trying to access a folder on the cd when everything froze so I hit Ctrl-Alt-Del. Now Drive E has disappeared and I am getting a message that there is "No supported CD-R/CD-RW drive".

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