Working Again

Left the laptop without battery or power overnight and tried again this morning. IT IS WORKING! So now I am making a desperately needed backup. No longer missing data!!

Laptop Down

My IBM thinkpad died unexpectedly today. I am trying to find out whether I have any chance of warranty fixes or at lest data rescue--I've lost my novel. I haven't backed up since 3 November. My 12000+ words of nanowrimo writing are gone. All the files I'd been stockpiling for DH's company are gone. Only a few PDF copies remain on DH's computer.

This is writtenfrom DH's netbook. No voice. So I will be pretty AWOL until we figure something out.

I am also without e-mail addresses and other things from my system, so this is why some people I really wish I could write back to (like the nice woman I met through nanowrimo who lives in Denmark) won't hear from me. :-(

Sam, if you're out there, I need your address! I lost that too. :-(

Bye-Bye Linux

If you've been paying any attention to my twitter, you probably already figured out that I have been reinstalling my laptop. The reinstall has gotten rid of all remnants of Linux.

I'm going to miss it. But it is still running on the server.

I have spent most of this week trying to get my laptop back to a usable state. Monday I did my back up, which took forever because I don't like how Windows burns DVDs. Then I spent the rest of the day trying to install Windows, because it takes like five times longer than a Linux install.

Once I finally got the basics of Windows installed and used the restore disk so that I have all that ThinkPad stuff again, I needed to start downloading and installing all the software that I actually use because I don't like what comes with Windows. So first I had to install a virus scanner. I am using AVG free version.

Once that was finished and installed, I started downloading Firefox. I had backed up my Firefox profile before reinstalling. So once I had Firefox installed, I copied that back in. Much to my frustration, it did not include my passwords, even though the description of backing up your profile said it would. Apparently you need to do a different backup step to get the passwords. I hope I can remember all of them.

With that installed, I can finally play my horse game again. So I took a break for a while. I was able to restore my e-mail settings from my backup as well.

Tuesday was a little hectic because DH was off work. But I was able to download and install open office. I had been using WordPerfect on the previous version of my laptop, but the restore disks that lenovo sent me did not include it. Fortunately, open office can read the files that I had saved. I don't know yet how well it works with Dragon, but I'm going to have to hope it works okay.

I don't remember exactly when I did what, but I have also installed Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the voice software, and gimp, my preferred photo editing software. I had some problems with Dragon, because it would not accept the profile I had backed up for it. It kept saying it couldn't find any updates, but I was sure there was one. When I tried again today, it found the update. Luckily for me, the updated version was able to read the imported profile. This means I am not stuck retraining Dragon from scratch. The thought of that was really horrifying.

So now I should have pretty much everything I need, but not any weird extra stuff that I installed because I had trouble figuring out something else. I do want to get rid of some of the Lenovo stuff on here, but I'm not sure what I can safely remove. I did at least get some stuff out of the startup so it is a little faster now.

Now I should have enough space so I can finally get more pictures and video sorted for both my blog and the girls blog.