Merry Belated Christmas

2009.12.28 - Monday

I'm finally able to access my website again. The hosting company performed some maintainance a couple of weeks ago, which of course caused my FTP login information to stop working. I don't think that was supposed to happen, but regardless, it's all sorted out now. Christmas was great, but the two days since have sucked. Well, mostly sucked.

I spent Boxing Day doing computer backups, followed by an installation of Windows 7. Definitely the easiest install process I've ever done with Windows, and pretty fast, too. Things were looking up until I noticed some really slow hard drive performance. Browsing folders worked for a while, and then all of a sudden one of them would hang for 20 or 30 seconds before opening. Some programs were taking a long time to install, so I tried playing a music file, which hung after barely a minute before resuming 30 seconds later. A quick Google search revealed some people having this issue before installing their motherboard chipset drivers. I'd already installed the latest ones, so I tried the old Vista version, and then the plain Intel version instead of the ones from Asus. No luck, same result. I'm not sure exactly what the problem is or who's to blame, but the drivers work fine for me in Vista so it's back on my machine for now. Two whole days...gone.

There is some good news. At the moment my machine is running great, my backups are all current, and my entire library of files is more organized than it has ever been. I still intend to upgrade to Windows 7 once I can find a reliable fix for the problem, but for now the only way I'm going to be doing that is through Google and forum searches. I've had my fill, at least for a while, of the Windows installation process. When all is said and done, however, there has been forward progress, even if I had to take the long way around.

Always look on the bright side!