I have been absent... my apologies

My two faithful readers, I apologize for ignoring my blog the past couple of days. I have been a bit busy with a laptop.

My friend Froli has a sister whose laptop decided to crash, fully and completely, this weekend. As I understand it, she was rebooting it in an effort to get rid of an annoying and increasing slowness, but instead of a reboot she got a BlueScreen. Puzzled, she attempted a new reboot, and that time around she got no signs of life from her laptop at all. We plugged it in, managed to boot it far enough to bring up the BlueScreen, and looked at the message on it. I spent the next few minutes in a highly unpleasant conversation evolving around "your hard drive might have died on you".

Luckily, that was not the case. First of all, Windows booted just fine when ordered to revert to a previous restore point. Much relief all around.

After some searching I found a rootkit and some other nastiness in the registry, but the hard drive is just fine, and the system as a whole is on the road to recovery. The laptop has been staying over at our house for the past few nights, the Norton Security Suite has been removed and competent freeware installed in its place, and aside from a brief conflict between ZoneAlarm and the router firewall, the laptop is now running smoothly and happily.

And yes, just in case someone other than my two loyal readers sees this, I do this for free. I like Froli's sister, she clearly appreciates that I'm spending time on this, and besides, she's family. (My conscience is forcing me to admit that the words "chocolate fondue" were not in any way discouraging me from working on her laptop.)

If you're not family, however, you'd better bring cash, and hand it over, before I even look at whatever mess your computer has become. Knowledge is a commodity, and I have a life, not to mention a romantic relationship, that I enjoy spending time in.