I have learned so much about my laptop, troubleshooting and fixing computer related problems since moving to Germany. I had never though about script and registry cleaners before. Never really needed them until I killed my laptop one day. Yea, I killed my precious computer, out of sheer stupidity. I had, for reasons unknown, decided that I needed a yahoo toolbar, then the next day I decided that it was a useless thing taking up real estate and I wanted to get rid of it. I looked everywhere for a way to get rid of it, even in my forbidden zone- the js pages in Dreamweaver (coding is NOT a strong point for me), I looked in the control panel, everywhere trying to get rid of the thing. I Googled and read somewhere that is is actually a virus and oh boy, that was the last thing I needed to hear! Now I am paranoid that I am going to loose my computer to a yahoo toolbar virus. So I go into Kaspersky, my anti virus and look for malicious anything that I can construe as a yahoo toolbar virus. I saw 5 items that Kaspersky said were highly critical. I forget what they were but because I was acting out of fear, I deleted the items without doing the usual research to see what they were first and if the were essential to my operating system.

Well the computer started acting slow and wanted to disk check when I turned it on again, now I KNOW I have a bug of some type. The next morning, I get up and turn on the computer and it does this check disk thing again, something is really wrong, but it managed to boot and I got to poking around under the tools menu of the browser window to see of I could get rid of the toolbar. Lo and behold there was a recent downloads choice there and what did I find there?  You guessed it, the damn yahoo toolbar download with and option to deactivate it!

HA HA HA HA HA on me. Relieved, I got rid of the thing and went about my business. All was okay until I shut off me machine, and a little while later tried to boot it up. The Blue Screen Of Death greeted me and the  machine went into a hellish loop trying to boot but not succeeding. I was devastated (to say the nicest thing I can about my tantrum). A search for a PC repair shop was futile, only 1 in Essen, so we decided to take my paperweight to the internet cafe around the corner. The guy was nice and tried to help by booting it up from a Windows Home Edition disk, one of those brown colored ones, it didn’t work. His prognosis was the hard drive was kaput. OK, now over to Essen to Conrad Computer and Electronics store for a new hard drive and price a German version of windows media center which was 295 euros.

I check on amazon and ebay for a new operating system in English and I come across several articles that say HP Pavilions have some kind of tattoo on the hardrive and the operating system, done so at the factory, so I can’t just swap out one hard drive for another, I can’t just buy any media center software and load it, there is a great chance it may not work because of this damn tattoo. What to do now? I had put off making back up disks, so we ordered some thru HP. Took over a week to get since they don’t ship to Europe, my brother had to get in the US them and send them.

Mean while, I had time to think since I had no computer (for a week), I got an idea that maybe I deleted the wrong items and it wasn’t really the hard drive. I have also read that Pavilions come with a partitioned hard drive, one the partition rests a Systems Recovery in the event of a crash. It has all the files to restore the computer back to the factory settings, how I got it out of the box. So, I just needed to get to the partition. The laptop has a quick play button that allows me to just play a DVD without booting up the operating system and I can get to Windows thru it. So I took a recently burned disc with Umbuntu – Linux something  or other operating system, and stuck it it into the machine. Lo and behold I got the thing into safe mode and was able to boot up in safe mode to the recovery partition! The fool (me) is thinking again, this time acting out of reasoning, not panic. So I immediately made back up disks once the recovery was done and of course the Hp disks show up the very next day! Another ha ha on me!

Now on to reload all the software, or so I thought. Here was the beginning of another long, long learning process. My Adobe Mastersuite 3 would not install. AGHHHHHHHHHHHHH! I don’t need to tell you about the next tantrum, so I’ll skip merrily ahead to how I got it to install. the problem was that if one of the programs in the collection is not deactivated before uninstalling the software, it will not install, so if your computer crashes, you are up the proverbial creek! I found out that the one way to get it installed again ( it has many installation bugs, I have read the nightmares tales of other unfortunates!), was to run a script cleanup in at level 3 and 4, not 1 or 2, which was what I was doing, then do a registry search to  find of anything having to do with Creative Suite 3 and get rid of it from the registry. This took another week to figure it out, I am a motion graphics person, I need Photoshop, After Effects, Illustrator, so it was torture not being able to do anything. Now I am in a hellish loop, on Google to research and read, try cleanup, try to install, it doesn’t work so uninstall and over and over again. FINALLY I get it to install after doing an mega script cleanup at level 4 with WinCS3 Clean scripts cleaner and jv 16 Power tools registry cleaner and bingo! It installed. I cannot describe the feeling of accomplishment I felt after fixing my own computer!

Well since then, I have had to trouble shoot Premier, it didn’t work after installing,  Illustrator had a catastrophic systems faliure I had to overcome. Yes, catastrophic- first time I ever saw such intense error message. Makes you think the world has just come to an end. I have downloaded and installed my blog and its plugins, I had to replace my DVD burner, it died afterI burned the back up DVDs. Another buggy item, DVD players in HP pavillions. There have been other assorted headaches, but I am getting more confidence in fixing the problems that 6 months ago I would have looked to a PC repair person for. It took moving to another country to get brave enough to do it! Go Figure.