Thanks. I will try a complete reinstall--EVENTUALLY!!!
Spike said:
Pest patrol detects a lot of false positives and always has done. It's never been that great really.
As for the email thing, well, could you possibly give us a list of what email programs you use? We will then try to give you instructions to create a backup copy of all those mails for each one. You will also need to create a backup copy of any files/documents you wish to keep.
You can mark a CD with a special CD marker. It's like a normal marker pen, but it doesn't degrade the information on the disk. They aren't expensive. In the meantime, untill you get one, you could put each cd in it's own case, and lable the case
The thing is, with that many problems and with those kinds of problems, it could be just a matter of time before you loose the lot anyway, which I'm sure you don't want to do.
Once you've backed up your information, which you REALLY need to do anyway, re-installing is the quite straight forward.
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Thanks. Well, CD-R-s were new to me at the time. I still did not know about the special markers, so thanks. I did lose 1040 emails, but I found a program that restored them. I generally use Netscape mail, which has a problem as it limits the memory size of each email folder, and when they get too big, you cannot retrieve any emails. I tried Thunderbird for awhile, but you are not able, as I recall, to send Thunderbird emails back to Netscape, or I had trouble trying to put them back into a their own file that I could load off the disk.
I have actually have a back-up external drive I bought back in March, but I still have it in an unopened box. It is a special one that even allows the use of the DVD-RAM format, which is not widely used but has some advantages. And I have a Toshiba DVD recorder that uses DVD-RAm discs as well as DVD-RW discs and DVD-R discs. It is terrific in theory, but has a host of problems. It is othe only DVD recorder made that can both pause live TV (like Tivo but there is a delay as it is stored to a disk), and Chase Play. Anyway, I bought this External Drive to back up my computer, so I might as well try it out.
I use a host or programs, as I have varied interests, and I do not keep my files well organized. There are programs for Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, updated drivers for the MIDI system I have, both hardware and software, educational programs for my son, financial programs that are not well known, a legal copy of Microsoft Office, Quickbooks, Finale , Pianist Pak by Pg Music, Kontakt, The Tassman Studio, and the list would get incredibly long, including PaintShop Pro, other art programs, Quicken and I do not know what else. These are all legal, but I did buy a few of them by download. These are the ones that are hard to make sure I have the right drivers.
Some of these I have no discs for, and I need to write the companies to get the drivers again.
This is a long project, obviously with so many programs, but I think a clean install might work wonders for my system. One strange thing that I never have understood is I am using Cox Cable and the speed had decreased by 75 percent, but just now I see it has returned back to normal. Some anti-spyware program must have helped it. This was fantastic news to me.
Anyway, I will try to keep at it, but as you can see, since I use the computer for so many things (I forgot to mention LegoMindstorms--the programmable robotic system of Legos, a digital camera, of course,ad infinitum), this is a rather big project. And of course, I use an Atari ST Emulator known as Steem, as even today, there are certain MIDI programs STILL not available in Windows, in any form, and these programs were not written 15 years ago.
Back in those days, I understood better how the internals of a computer, but they were not as complicated, of course.
Finally another problem I have is when using Netscape, which I prefer to using IE, although I shohyld probably use Firefox ( I used to use Opera), is that no many how many times I try to reinstall it, any videos that come up, for example with the L.A. Times which I read daily, refuse to work.
And besides Thunderbird, and Web Mail services such as gmail, what email programs do people use besides Outlook? I cannot remember if Firefox has its own email program, but I thought it did not, from the brief times I tried it. I liked some aspects of Thunderbird, but there was something I just did not like about it, although I do not know what it is now. Cox has decided to put all SPAM it finds in a special Web Mail folder, and users have no choice in the matter. If a legitimate message ends up there, it is just your tough luck, so someone with a lot of messages, has to go into the SPAM folder quite a lot.