The most traumatic thing happened to me the other day when I opened Photoshop and it refused to open photos or images of any kind, even teeny tiny ones. It wouldn’t even create a new image. The program completely and utterly stopped responding to the point that it had officially died in my opinion. So I tried doing a repair. Didn’t work. I tried doing an uninstall/reinstall. Didn’t work. On the verge of tears I decided that the only thing I could do was the ultimate sacrifice ever.
Now let me remind you that this laptop was bought back when Vista was brand new and shiny and hellaciously spurned by everyone when they found out how buggy it was and that there were no drivers included in this bloated concoction of an operating system. This laptop was purchased when the wonderful and all-powerful Microsoft said ‘you will sell vista only or you will have no OS’ to everyone, basically screwing all of us to damnation. Just for that they made a special hell for them, I am told that there’s only vista available with no fixes, drivers or updates. Mwahahaha! Take that you bastards!
So anyway, on to the horror and trauma that I have had to endure during the reset. It was actually really freaking easy. Once I did a google and found out how exactly to cause the laptop to allow me to do the restore I didn’t have to do more than follow the prompts. It was eerily easy.
Then came the downloading of the updates. As vista update was downloading somewhere around 72 updates the first time around I was busy installing the installers that originally came with the laptop. This included Roxio software, AOL software and several other installers that there was no need to have on the computer being as no one ever used them.
Then it started installing the updates it had downloaded. The entire process from restore to factory settings to finishing the installation of updates took around 8 to 10 hours (give or take) and was almost painless. Once all the ‘shut down to install’ and ‘restart because you installed such and such’ was over I went to bed. I had also installed Live, Yahoo and Aim messengers and Avast virus scanning software somewhere during this time.
Since early this morning I have reinstalled Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash CS3 and they are all working beautifully. I have also reinstalled Microsoft Office 7 and a few other things that were needed. I’ve already began to collect fonts and brushes as well, being as I forgot to move them to a disc (oops) and that’s always fun to do, depending. Brushes for Adobe are easy to unzip and cut, then paste into their folder. The fonts I found are easier when you highlight them all, right click and choose Install All from the menu. That is the easiest time I’ve ever had installing fonts on Vista!
I’ve also made some major changes as well to the system properties. I turned off desktop composition completely instead of just for certain programs. No more flippy-floppy screen for me! I also turned off the elusive mouse shadow that I have never seen, menu sliding, shadows and more. The laptop is running better than it has in a very long time. I also plan to do a disk cleanup and defragmentation when I go to bed tonight. Yes, after reformatting the hard drive, installing vista and all these updates and programs, you should definitely defrag. Even when you buy a new computer, the first thing should be defragging it! I swear they do not do it before shipping it out. (And if you work for Dell or Compaq/HP or any other computer building company and you DO defrag before shipping out a system, please feel free to speak up!)
So I am back and I am still working on installing stuff in between doing little things to make it ‘mine’ once again, or at least my login anyway. I’m sure Honey will want access back as well once I get settled in. Laters!
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