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I haven’t blogged in awhile as I had a bit of a computer crash.  Saturday, a week ago, the laptop was running slowly and then not at all.  I use Solid Basis Networks for my tech help.  Owner, David, is always helpful, provides good prompt service and has patience for my less than stellar tech knowledge.  David came to my office Monday morning equipped with his tools of the trade.   I was WAY less freaked out than with previous crashes as I had made two basic, but crucial changes in the last year.  My fancy new phone convinced me to switch to g-mail.  So, no freaking out about my mail as it was all there.  And after paying beaucoup bucks for data retrieval last time, I’d been doing online back ups with Carbonite.

David determined that this was not a software issue as we had hoped.  I have all those disks, but they weren’t doing us much good.  The hard drive was still under warranty from the last issue (about now is where you mac users can just sit quietly), so we started the process for a replacement hard drive.  David took the lap top and programs, and would do his magic so they could all be installed quickly once the new hard drive came in.  The new hard drive didn’t come in…so by Thursday, when the tracking # showed it hadn’t even been sent (!), David and I agreed to have him purchase and install a new new hard drive.  The down time and computer hopping was killing me.  A smart phone is great, but actually running a real estate business from it isn’t so great.

By Thursday afternoon I had my laptop back with the new hard drive and basic windows programs installed.  Now to see what the Carbonite retrieval process would actually look like.  Getting the “Restore” function started was quite easy, I just logged into the website and it did the rest.  I did have the choice to only restore certain things, or to start restoring certain things first.  I chose to do the whole kit and kaboodle, with no specifics.  I remember now that the original Carbonite back up, when I first signed up,  took several days, so it made sense that a complete restore would also take time.  Which it did.  The restore funtion runs in the back ground, so I did have the laptop back and could do some stuff.  I set up Outlook fresh, as email is essential and I am an Outlook addict.  It too me a day or so to realize the process would be  quicker if I changed my settings so the computer woudl keep working;  wouldn’t sleep, or shut down. 

Carbonite did a great job restoring all my documnents, files, photos, etc.  I did have to do a few tricks to get all the personal folders and such (the Outlook pst file) into Outlook.  I-tunes loaded fine, but I did have to re-load the music, which was relatively quick and painless.  I use Xobni, which is a fab indexer for Outlook; helps find emails, files etc using a variety of different search techniques, plus some other cool stuff.  I have been unable to get Xobni back up and running, even using their help tools;  uninstalling and reinstalling a variety of things, restarting the laptop etc.  I hope to have time today to work with Xobni to get that going.

And then of course, I haven’t been able to get the printer driver installed to print wirelessly at home.  Oh yeah,there is a work around.  I can e-mail things to my husband or daughter, but that is not a long term solution.  I’ll give the printer stuff one more solid try and then enlist David’s help one more time.  If we’re lucky he can get things set remotely; though my dogs always enjoy a visit from him.