Birgit's Daily Bytes: Back again! Finally!

And I am back! I didn’t really mean to be absent, but it just happened.

Several weeks ago I was looking at some photos of a friends new baby, when my computer showed for a split second the blue screen of death and shut down. Bewildered I tried to boot up again and I got a virus warning just long enough for me to read “trojan” and “severe attack” before the blue screen of death happened again.

After that I was unable to get to the desktop anymore and well, long story short, it took me a few days of trying to anyway until I finally admitted defeat and took the computer in to be repaired. The verdict was that it would take 10 days for them to get to my computer and that they will be able to pull most of my data off the hard drive and would just reinstall it. Since I am pretty well backed up, I wasn’t really all that worried about data loss beyond a few preferences which would be a pain to redo but not much else.

So the time passes, we get the computer back and fork out a shameful amount of money for the privilege of a now newly installed computer. I brace for the task of reinstalling everything, downloading endless hours of backed up data etc. But, it’s a no go!

Turns out – but it took me a while to figure it out – that the repair shop installed a 32-bit windows version on my 64-bit machine and well things were just not meshing! So I call the computer guys who essentially refuse to admit any fault, even going as far as saying that the windows key we provided for the machine would only work for a 32-bit version.

Looooooooooong story short … after much discussion, several calls for a supervisor/manager and printed out confirmations from Microsoft that basically they are talking rubbish, they proceeded to install the RIGHT version of windows.

Then followed several days of reinstalling, updating, re-updating, restoring back ups and what not. It’s amazing how long that takes now that hard drives are in TBs and not 1 GB anymore!

But here I am. Mostly back! Only one program did not accept the database backup I had for it and of course it’s one of the most work intensive, so it’ll take me a few weeks to be back where I was there. Good thing I am currently on a sabbatical work-wise, otherwise this would be quite a setback.

During all this time my father and his wife also came to visit from Germany. We had a great week! The weather was perfect, the kids were thrilled and a good time was had by all! They haven’t seen the kids since they were just over a year old, so this visit was really special!