The Lost Day

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7.00am. What a right pain in the posterior! Just when I was getting ahead and I had nothing pressing to do work-wise, I discovered that for some unknown reason, my NetBook was booting-up and then freezing. Several re-boots later, nothing much had changed, so it was obviously something serious!

After a bit of detective work I discovered that the external micro SD card had somehow become corrupted – well at least I’d found out what the problem was!!

So, what to do then? Plan A: I decided to copy all of the data off of the corrupted micro-SD card, but obviously that didn’t work because the card was corrupted and the copying got about a quarter way through before spluttering various error messages at me. Luckily, the most recent back-up of the card was only a week old, so I copied that onto a spare micro-SD card. That took ages, but I was quite pleased with myself that it was all going to plan.

10.30am. I inserted the spare card and everything seemed to be working but I spoke too soon! The exception was Office 2007 that threw up an ‘installing’ window every time I launched Word, PowerPoint, Excel or Visio (MS Project seemed to be OK). Ok, I thought, I’ll just uninstall Office 2007 and then reinstall it – how hard can that be?

..well pretty hard actually! After selecting the uninstall option, the uninstall process just stopped after a few seconds saying there had been an error.

12.15pm. I repeated the process a number of times, but I always got the same message.

So, I can’t uninstall it and I can’t get rid of the message every time I launch the main programs. Time for some drastic action! I blew the dust off an old copy of Office 2003 and installed that. So far so good, with all programs installing perfectly…or so I thought!

All programs worked fine except Outlook 2003 that was complaining about ‘the wrong dll’ being installed and advising me to reinstall.

2.00pm. A quick Google and it seems that my dll problem was also shared by a gazillion other people. Various fixes were promised – deleting certain files, renaming other and installing various bits of software – but none seemed to work. In the end, without any idea what to do next, I downloaded Service Pack 2 for Office 2003…and it seemed to solve the problem.

Tea-time – and we’re nearly there. I just need to carry out a Windows update and customise the main applications and I’m back in business.

6.00pm. The Windows Update was over 200 Mb, so that meant a hour or three downloading stuff.

We’re off to our dance class later, and that’ll be perfect for letting the PC download all the bits it needs to get itself totally up-to-date.

10.15pm. Everything seems to have downloaded as it should have done and normal service has been resumed. What a day – 7am until 10pm to fix a computer – unbelievable!!!!