This blog has a lot to do with tatting but involves no thread. So now you are wondering Clyde what the heck are you going to talk about. Well the topic today is COMPUTERS. Our two year old laptop was running really slow and it was starting to stop performing a couple programs that are required to do day to day functions, often making it impossible to open a lot of e-mails so after consulting with computer tech's I was given the verdict that I needed to reformat my hard drive. Now if your computer knowledge is as up to date as mine is I had no idea what this meant but I knew I did not have the money to have a professional do it and I did not want my laptop out of my possession for any length of time as I have information on my laptop that I would rather not share with a stranger, like my banking information etc.
Well I decided to do it myself with some help from the computer tech's from the maker's of my laptop and the store that sold it to me and my partner's son via long distance. Here is what it entailed for me.
The first thing I had to do was decide what I wanted to save from the computer as I was about to wipe my hard drive clean. This may sound easy but when I started looking I found that I had 1,827 pictures that take 8.74 GB of space, the files I wanted to save, the favorites, and other documents ended up with me needing close to 37GB of storage. Yes I said 37 GB of storage. this number blew me away I always thought that a gig or 2 of memory was more than anyone would ever need. I have had my eyes opened. I had to save all this information on disks and USB sticks which took a bit of time. Then I got lucky normally you would wipe your hard drive clean then start to reformat it using back up disks to return it to its factory settings. On my laptop there was a way to enter the start up sequence and cause the hard drive to return the hard drive back to its factory settings. When I started up the computer with its old settings there was a lot of updating to do. There where 85 updates to windows to download that took 5 1/2 hours, then came the updates from the computer manufacturer. After hours of these downloads and many restarts it was time to download all the programs and software that I was using on my laptop. All in all, after 3 1/2 days I did it. I reformatted my laptop.
The laptop runs a lot faster now and the programs are working better. It was not easy but it was worth it and now I know how to reformat a laptop. Who said you can't teach an old dog new tricks.
