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Wrangling with the beast that is my computer

I am beginning to think that whoever came up with the non-destructive recovery thing needs their head examined. Did they tell you that they would re-install all the programs that came with the factory PC (which is fine), but that they would leave lots of traces of the old programs that were supposedly erased? This goes for things like Microsoft .NET which was another story unto itself. I had to install over 200MB of windows updates, which is fine. However, when it came time to install programs, I was in deep doo-doo. For instance, with .NET 2.0 and 3.0, the installation kept failing with some error code that I couldn’t find a solution to. Well, the long and short was, .NET files were littered on my computer so I had to download a removal tool from a Microsoft guy (Aaron Stebner) who works on .NET which removed all instances of .NET (i.e. .NET 1.1, 2.0 and 3.0). Only then, was I able to install all the .NET flavors. All was fine & dandy and I should have let sleeping dogs lie. I was connected to the internet (!), I had installed the latest microsoft updates (!!), I had my defenses installed (!!!), but my $70 Nvidia GeForce FX 5500 graphics card was lying useless. So, I took it upon myself to do a simple swap out. Do you see where the problem lies? In the Device manager (rightclick “My Computer” and select “Manage:. Then, go to “Device Manager” and click the plus sign by “Display Adapter”), it said that Nvidia Drivers were enabled! However Add & Remove programs had no record of this.

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Now, I didn’t know how to go about this so there was a lot of trial and error involved. Hell, I still don’t know if I got it right, but I’m online and typing this, aren’t I? First, I disabled the onboard integrated Intel graphics card I had, swapped my cord connection to the Nvidia card and restarted. I got hit with a blank screen. After a few cold restarts, I got a msg about Windows not starting right due to some hardware/software conflict. I was happy because at least, it let me get into Safe Mode. While there, I then, re-enabled the onboard graphics card, but wasn’t able to re-install the Nvidia drivers. So, another cycle of rebooting began. To make a long story short, the settings on my computer are thus, I’ve uninstalled the Intel Extreme Graphics Driver and now have Nvidia Drivers installed. In Device manager, it shows the integrated graphics card as being enabled although I don’t know what impact it’ll have on the functioning of my Nvidia graphics card.

Right now, I’m tired and done with tinkering with stuff on my computer. It’s time to get to more important things like fiddling with my spanking new camera. Oooh, did I forget to tell you? I’m going camping for Labor Day for 3 days. lol. This should be fun and interesting because the group consists of me & Matt, his dad, Matt’s friend (John), and Julie & Jonathon. This camera couldn’t have come at a better time. I’m sure that with time, I’ll discover more things that have been left over, no thanks to the silly non-destructive recovery thingie. I should have gone with my initial reformat-the-harddrive thought. *sigh* Still, I’m online and that’s almost more than enough for me. And my computer’s booting up in less than 2 minutes, a miracle after the sluggishness that was just a week ago. I know I didn’t have any virii or baddies. I just had a shitload of programs on a mere 160GB hard drive that I rarely used! I mean, I had at least 5 graphics editing programs (Photoshop CS, Irfanview, InkScape, GIMP, & SnagIt. Does ConceptDraw count?). I won’t go into too much detail, but suffice it to say that I will be severely curtailing my visits to certain sites.