Please release me, let me go

I'm very annoyed. In fact I'm more than annoyed, I'm very very cross and fed up. Yesterday I was silly and clicked on the Friend Finder application on Farcebook. I know, I know, you should never click on anything on the right hand side, but I believed its lies about which of my friends had used it, and now all my real friends are going to get the spam emails like Ned's had in the past about how X, Y and Z are suggesting he joins Farcebook himself. Seeing that some of the invites have been from me, and I haven't sent them, I know it's all spam.

But worse than that I now can't fully sign out of Windows Live after using my email account. All the Hotmail accounts on this computer, even ones that Farcebook haven't heard of, give the same message after signing out - that it's failed to log out of the following site: h ttps://ssl.facebook. com/accept_token. php (I've put in a few spaces to try to stop it making a link). When I paste that into google I find it's been happening for years, with various suggestions of what to do to fix it. The ones that aren't too complicated for me to understand are clearing cookies (done, no effect) and contacting Windows live help (done, no answer).

Does anyone else have any ideas? I'm really not happy.

When I'm calling yooooo oooo oooo ooooo

Piglet has changed since Harry's death. Although he's stopped searching for him in every room in the house, or looking round for him when we're out on our walks, he's become less independent and confident and much clingier, and likes us all to be together in the house. Anyone going out causes distress, and now whenever Ned leaves for work he gets summoned to return to the group:



This can go on for some time. Luckily our neighbours don't seem to be bothered.

Computer-wise I managed (with a bit of help) to remove the old defunct commenty system; shame, because I thought it was very good. Unfortunately it means that none of the comments on previous posts show, and it looks like I'm a real Billy-no-mates who's been talking to herself for the past however many years. I was able to copy them all over to the hard drive, and if I have a spare few years I might replace them all, but as it'd probably mean copying them all individually I can't see that happening in the near future.

Wee'll meet again

The weekend nearly went according to plan; Piglet knows how to choose his moment! He'd been a real grumpy-bum for the last couple of evenings, so I'd wondered what was wrong - I found out when I was setting out with them for their afternoon walk and noticed he was cocking unsuccessfully.

Panic stations. Back home (with the dogs protesting about the rubbish walk) to ring the vet and say we were on our way. This was at 2.30; surgery closes at 3 on Saturdays, and Leamington's 10 miles away. Isn't it always the way that, in an emergency situation you get stuck behind Mr Forty-five-mph-is-plenty with no opportunity to overtake, and all the traffic lights turn red at your approach? We parked as close as we could to the surgery and ran, which seemed to help a lot because, as we paused outside the vet's Piglet cocked his leg again and the floodgates opened! No rodding required thankfully. He was given a quick check over (because it would be rude not to), while the vet nurses sulked at not being able to add catheterisation to their list of accomplishments.

So home, in a more relieved mood, to find the lovely Omally had arrived to help us install our new computer. This, of course, involved copious imbibement whilst downloads were uploaded and uploads were downloaded (I think), finally calling it a day having watched White Horses, the Clangers, Ivor the Engine (psshhtaka, psshhtaka) and Noggin the Nog at one in the morning. Astonishingly when I went into the living room to get the dogs to go to bed all the cheese was still untouched on the coffee table; even Ned's favourite stinky ones. So no worries about a) squits or b) impaction from the clingfilm. What good dogs!

We all felt a little fragile today, and I forgot to thank Om for being wonderful.

We must chat about a very important matter

The computer isn't very happy at all. I didn't know it was possible for an electronic clock to be quite so inaccurate - it's losing about half an hour a day. Anyone know what causes that?

Confusion

We're having horrible computer problems. Despite running anti-virus software and stuff like that, and not downloading any strange stuff or even visiting unusual websites, and never opening suspect emails, the past few days have been infuriating. It takes about half an hour and seven restarts, including a couple of system restores, to be able to get the damn thing going, and then it's liable to crash at any moment. It looks as though we'll have to get a new computer and have no idea what's the best deal for us, and how to reinstall the stuff we need, and all the absolutely vital work which is stuck on the external hard-drive and didn't want to transfer to the new hard drive after the last explodification, or the new info in the folders.

We tried to save the folders and pictures to disk, but hadn't installed the disk writing software. So Ned installed that, and was told to restart the computer. That meant all the start up problems started again, and we had to do a system restore, which means that the CD writing software needs to be installed again, which will mean a restart, which means a system restore .....

Do we dare risk doing another backup onto the external hard drive, or will that just transfer all the problems to a new computer when we eventually get one? A new computer will mean installing everything from scratch, and a new running system might not recognise the saved information anyway. And whether we can ever get back online again is anyone's guess. I feel a tad stressed.

Floating in limbo

A thorough (well, as thorough as I dare) search of the external hard drive tells me that we did no backups between September 05 and April 07 - which isn't beyond the realms of possibility. But the latest backup doesn't show files and documents that I know were saved between those dates; that old diary, my CV, my list of the hours I work so I know how much to invoice my employer (eek!), squillions of photos etc.

But I think I've worked out a possible explanation. Between the last two backups, when all that work was done, we had an explodification and a tame geek managed to extract all that useful stuff and replace it when he'd scrubbed the hard drive. But when he loaded it all again he put on an earlier version of Windows (let's call it version A) from what we'd had previously but everything was hunky dory. Not so good in general but had features that we didn't have before so was okay. It was this version that was running when we did the April backup.

Then came the last explodification. This time we've reinstalled the later version (version B) which works much better but won't recognise the data that had been added when we did the backup with the earlier version.

I reckon if we were to find a computer that was running version A we could recover the data, put it onto a disk and then copy it onto this computer we could then do a backup (I'd also print it out onto hard copy so it's real!) and I wouldn't be fainting at the thought of redoing all those months of work.

Bang bang, that awful sound

Did I tell you we’ve had another computer explodification? No, I didn’t think so. It manifested itself by playing Ring-a-ring-roses when it was meant to turn on – it’d get partway there then restart. So I called our local computer-mender who kindly came out in the hour between packing and leaving for Heathrow for 3 weeks in Oz and Fiji. He fitted a shiny new hard drive, plugged our external drive into it and hastily copied saved stuff over. Except that it doesn’t seem to have copied everything over. Lots of documents are floating in limbo, including several months’ work of transcribing a diary from 1862 and the contents being inserted chronologically into previously-copied letters and other documents for future publication. Buggerbuggerbuggerbugger. I know we did a backup recently so where the sodding hell’s it all gone?

De-Fraggle rock

Today I have mainly been trying to defrag the compluter. I understand the principle of it okay, and know how to get the thing to start doing it. But it’ll get to about 10% and then inform me that the drive’s changed and it’s restarting. I asked several people what I should do and was advised to make sure that no other programs are running at the time as they’ll be causing the problem. Righto – how do I do that? On desktop, hit Ctrl/Alt/Del I was told, then shut down the programs on the list one at a time.

I’ve found a snag with that. If I click End Task at the bottom of the box, the highlighted program certainly stops running, but the list box also goes away. If I Ctrl/Alt/Del in an attempt to get it back so I can stop more programs, the computer shuts down. No matter what I do I can only stop one program – not all of them (I was told to leave Explorer running to keep the computer going). Last night I had to restart the computer 4 times as I worked my way through all the available options. I can’t even manage to highlight all the programs I want to stop at once. Usually holding Ctrl while clicking down a list selects more than one, but that doesn’t work with this.

So I thought I’d google for instructions on defragging. D’oh! It’s not really helpful to simply be told that ‘It’s best to shut down all other programs while defragging’ without being told how. So I kept on trying and eventually succeeded on getting it so that only Explorer was showing as running - screensaver shut down and everything. Hurrah! Here we go!

Nope. Just the same. Gets to 10% then says the drive's changed. I’m stumped. Suggestions? Or do I learn to love the effect of wading through treacle?

Edit: Gordon, you're a star! F8ing at Startup and going into Safe Mode did the trick. Thank you!