First Crisis with New Computer

Hello everyone. It's been a long last few days. It looks like I've just pulled through my first major crisis with this new Mac of mine. Slowly over the past while, working in Windows became more and more impossible as Windows Explorer would keep crashing and not being able to recover. This rendered the computer pretty useless for most things. Strangely, I could still always get speech and Kurzweil going. However, merely trying to examine a folder on the hard drive was usually a death sentence for Windows Explorer. I had to call the good folks at Frontier Computing who, when we found recovery was hopeless otherwise, showed me how to restore the complete Windows partitian from the Mac side using software called Winclone. This restored me to the state my computer was in when they first delivered it. I ended up having to perform this restoration twice more as I'd keep reaching points where I couldn't get speech going for love or money. Each time I did this, I unwittingly forfeited an authorisation for Jaws. Now, I've at last succeeded in reaching a point of apparent stability. I did this by disabling Jaws and using System Access and NVDA while the system obtained a whole thwack of updates for Windows7. The only other major difference is that I have elected to keep Internet Explorer 8 and not get 9 for now.

It was quite a long tedious process reaching this point. I feel like I've fought ten rounds only to win due to an unseen slippery patch on the ground that my enemy happened to step on. A pure fluke of luck. Did updates get installed differently? Did I do something different and crutial durring the last attempt that saved the day? I have no idea. Presumeably, I'll get new Jaws authorisations tomorrow and will be able to use it and my Braile display again. Meanwhile, I've been using mainly System Access. I managed to recover the text from the error event viewer which logged one of the last Windows Explorer crashes I experienced. Unlike before, the system was able to restart Windows Explorer and keep going without crashing. I have absolutely no idea why. Hopefully, the event error text will be more meaningful to other folks than it is to me. I'd hate to think I had gone through that slogging for no gain at all. Whether I've staved off the problem for good or it's slowly building to strike again is still uncertain. I'm going to back up absolutely every piece of writing I do for the next while. I'll also be slow to install more software until a virus of some sort is ruled out. Needless to say, I've tripple checked both my Imac and my external drive for any such thing. Initially, I found a couple of infected files including regcure and an unidentified trojan. Both have been killed and haven't resurficed.

On friday night, I was unexpectedly invited out for drinks and dinner with friends from church. It couldn't have come at a better time. Lost in my computer struggle, I had no idea it was as late in the evening as it was. Great conversation and good food were just what the doctor ordered. I enjoyed the evening thoroughly. On coming home, I stayed up until after two AM working on my computer. Had pretty much everything sorted and under control by around eleven. The rest of the day and today have been quite enjoyable. Damned nice to be able to look in a folder without freezing the system. Here's hoping it stays that way. I also fixed a lon-standing issue with Juice, my podcast grabber of choice. It's now operating very well. A matter of using compatibility mode. Once I get Jaws sorted out, I'm thinking of trying to use Winclone to make a backup image of Windows that I can restore much farther and faster from should I run into the same crap again.

I very much hope the weather at last makes up its mind to stay in Spring mode over the next while. It was snowing out there today and raining yesterday. I'd like to start getting out there and walking a bit more. To be at all motivated to do that, I need nice weather. Perhaps, this week, I'll also finally get to digging more into the Voiceover user guide and getting more of a grasp on the Mac OS which has seemingly just saved my busted Windows7 ass.