Wow, I feel like I just lost half a week here. I spend way too much time in front of the computer so I’m always a little concerned about having the thing die on me without good back-ups handy. Well, my main hard drive had been making these weird little clicking noises for a couple weeks so I figured I’d better install a new one before it died on me. I cloned the entire drive to an external hard drive just in case, and figured I could then put in a new C: drive, re-install windows and all my software and be right back in business. Ah, optimistic me. It turned out to be a royal pain, with much swapping back and forth of the new drive and the old drive, etc.

The worst part was that once I had Windows re-installed, and was preparing to re-install all the drivers, the monitor would only display at 640×480, and the areas on the screen where I needed to click weren’t even showing up anymore. If I could just click on that box two inches off to the lower right I’d be fine. I lost about a day on that one and finally figured out a work around.

Well, I finally got everything all working but I’ve been dealing with it off and on since last Friday. I’m not really complaining – well, just a little – since I didn’t lose anything and everything seems to be working fine. It’s always great having a fresh operating system without all the accumulated crud that slows things down. Now I just turn it on and it fires right up without the five-minute-long churning and searching that it used to do whenever I booted up. It never works exactly like it used to after installing a new system drive, which can be frustrating, but in a week or so I won’t remember. Now, I just have to back up this drive. Be prepared, as they say.