and after 11 hours of working on it . . .

it kinda works! My original attempt to reinstall Windows didn’t go very well at all. The computer ended up in a loop where it asked to reboot in safe mode or last known good etc. and no matter which option was selected it would attempt to reboot and go back to that screen.

After two and a half hours on the phone with a very nice man named “Albert” (who I’m pretty sure was at a call center somewhere, probably india) we managed to get the hard drive reformatted, windows reinstalled and some of the drivers back in place.

I worked on some more of it on my own for a while, then had a call with the folks who make our wireless router . . . the first guy wasn’t a whole lot of help, didn’t want to stay on the phone while I ran the stuff (estimated to take 30 minutes) so I tried it, got the router to work but not the wireless part and called back. The second guy was much more helpful. Stayed on the line walking me through every possible explanation fo rwhat was happening and even tipped me off to a great program for removing spyware!!!! Its called Spysweeper from webroot. The darn thing caught spyware that had been installed while my computer had been reconnected to the web for less than an hour! Man alive they work fast!!!!

Office, the camera and a few other basics have been reinstalled and so, after more than 11 hours of working on this thing today, I’m going to call it a night! Tomorrow I can try to reinstall the rest of the software we normally use and see how that goes! Wish me luck!!!

PS. I’m about 4 inches away from finished with a sock that I cast on yesterday, thanks to all this time being spent waiting for things to download, reload, reboot and generally get there act together!