Hooray for Lee!

My computer can be temperamental at times. It does this stuff like not "seeing" the monitor at start up, or winking out for no reason & rebooting itself (according to Trevor, mostly when he's trying to play WoW), and it ran a lot more slowly than it was supposed to according to the amount of memory it had.

Last Wednesday, I was biking while I was getting reputation for my little gnome to get his elephanty ride when suddenly I was booted from the internet. Connor got upset because he was watching cartoons on YouTube & couldn't access them. We unplugged all the phone lines, turned everything off, plugged stuff in and turned things on again - no luck. Lee had to call Qwest, our ISP.

On my end of the phone, Lee sounds kind of mean, but it's because the guy on the other side knows less than Lee does about what to do. And he doesn't pick up on this, even when Lee is asking him which specific IP address he wants him to use, and gives him 3 or 4 choices.

Lee does whatever the guy tells him to no avail. We still can't log in. And then the guy says they are getting more reports of the internet being down for other people. So it's not our house, it's somewhere else. So they'll call when things are up again, and we all go to bed 3 hours later without hearing anything (Lee did ask the guy not to call after 10:00 pm).

In the morning, everyone is able to log in again - except me. My system keeps trying to come up but gets stuck just after post (black screen with white writing - before Windows comes up). Then it shuts down and tries again. Then again. I'm not sure how many times it tried, because I took a shower during this. When I come out & see the computer is still not up, I let Lee know.

He tries various things, and it's not going to be a quick fix. Something is really messed up. I go to work and Lee's going to work on the system for me. I don't know what all he did, because that's not my thing, but by Thursday night, it's still not going, and I may have lost everything saved on my system! Eeek!

This is a home computer, and really the most important stuff on here are my photos. I typically save them all to CD once a year. But I hadn't saved anything from THIS year yet. That would include the last photos I have of my dad; his memorial; Diana's MADE experience; Leonie's visit; the San Diego trip; Diana going to college, etc. Lately since my camera died, I hadn't added anything - but I was hoping for a new camera once we can do that again. I really wanted to be able to recover my photos, mostly. Anything I've posted in the blog I could recover, but still...

So Friday Lee spent a lot of the day working on my system again. And he saved it! W00t!

There was some bad RAM or something that he had to remove, and he warned me my system might run a bit more slowly - but I haven't noticed the difference yet. I can access my photos, play W0W, and blog :) I'm happy.

I'm going to save my stuff to CD today...