One More Time!

You may have noticed some time has passed since my last post. Just a few days after we had my computer all patched up, it crashed again. Luckily, having learned my lesson, I had backed up all my documents to a flash drive so I was less hysterical and more resigned this time. The only things unsaved were my photographs, too numerous to fit on my only flash drive.

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I still have all my pictures on memory cards, but I didn't relish the thought of downloading, organizing, and editing about 3,000 photos all over again. However, by the time I bought another flash drive, my computer had completely frozen up.
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Then I was blessed with a second miracle. Some may call it a coincidence, but I know I experienced one of God's tender mercies.

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Wyndie was on her way over to fix my computer again, so I turned it on. All day it had frozen within 30 seconds, not allowing me to access anything, but this time the computer kept running long enough for me to plug in the new flash drive and download my pictures, about 20 minutes. Ten seconds after the last picture loaded, the computer froze. It returned to freeze-after-30-seconds mode each time we started it up after that. You see, an unexpected miracle!

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Below is an actual picture of Wyndie as she prepared to work on my computer again.

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Just kidding! She would never wear such a tacky dress!

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Wyndie had to deconstruct my computer, wiping it clean to reformat the drive and rebuild the programs. It went well until she installed a MicroSoft update: service pack 3. My computer immediately crashed again. Guess what I installed just before the original crash? You guessed it: service pack 3!

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We had to deconstruct and reformat all over again, but this time we opted not to install service pack 3. Now my computer is working great, and my documents and pictures downloaded easily from the flash drive.

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If you've downloaded service pack 3 and all is well, be grateful. If not, I would either avoid it altogether or at least be sure you have the latest hardware updates installed. Apparently it put my computer into a loop, constantly running in the background until it took up so much space there was no memory left to run my programs. We found articles online describing how it causes these crashes.

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I hate to admit this, but the one thing I did forget to preserve was my newly recreated contact list. I had collected 23 of my lost email addresses, but now they are gone again.

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So please, please, please send me an email soon so I can rebuild my contacts ONE LAST TIME! I can't wait to hear from you!