Restore the PC back to Factory Settings

As much as I tried it finally became impossible to work on my PC, all the programmes began to crash after a few minutes working with them, one by one they all started to fail in some way, and the final straw was loosing my internet connection. Despite the countless Windows error messages I just needed to keep going until I could find a time slot to restore the operating system and then install my apps and the countless little utilities and freebies. Then of course I have to remember how to achieve all the customising that goes into Windows and Office so that the PC feels somewhere near familiar.

During the last week I was cadging my way around doing my work, for example MS Word would no longer open so I used a combination of Word Pad with a cut and paste into Outlook to spell check. I knew that I was only delaying the inevitable but I couldn’t find the time to do the job

So today I did my last checks, made certain that I had backed up my data and had a record of all the passwords and usernames (you know the ones you don’t often input because the computer remembers each time). Right, in goes the XP cd, and theres no turning back at that stage. Coming out the other side, at the moment, I can’t get any sound so I cant listen to music on YouTube while I’m working, and although I can receive emails at the moment I cant send them. The many times that I have done this I don’t think there has ever been a smooth restore and install operation.

The worst shock was when I tried to restore all my data files from my external hard drive and getting an error message of a corrupt disk that can’t be accessed. At this stage I’m a little worried. No I’m very worried because that’s all my photos, emails, address books; you name it its all on that 500gb hard drive. After a short time I take stock, its not as bad as I thought but still bad enough because I have parts of the data and certainly not the latest versions on various hard drives and DVDs, CDs and memory sticks. I decide to give it another go and switched the hard drive off at the mains before plugging it into another machine, wow it worked I am saved. Of course I work on the basis that I have a copy of all files on the tower and a backup on the hard drive, but the towers hard drive had been wiped and with it my files. Next time I will make a back up of the back up, a bit excessive but a necessity. So here I am with my pics and ready to blog on . Amazing I have just noticed that my new fresh installation of MS Word does not recognise the word Blog in the spellchecker.