It started out with sporadic BSOD - (Windows Blue Screen of Death) while this was going on I was able to get my most important work moved to an external hard drive so at least nothing would be lost. Well that went fairly well and the end result worked out pretty good seems I only lost one important file and was able to rebuild that! But the steps to fix the computer ran like this.
1. Check hard drive - seemed to be working fine.
2. Check video - seemed fine.
3. Ran memory check and all was good.
Figured I had Windows problem so looked at Windows recovery - should have done further checking on memory - but went ahead and recovered Windows which removed all my programs and took the laptop back to it's original state when I brought it home! UGH!
4. Restarted the recovered Windows and still got the BSOD! - Shut down and pulled the memory out and replaced with a new 8 GB stick I had bought a long time ago. Put the computer back together and it ran like a charm. Added back in one of the old sticks and it failed again...tried the other extra old stick and failed again. So decided to just run it with the one new 8 GB stick and everything seemed fine.
5. Dug out all my software and re-installed everything...all was running well, but this took about 2 days and then the computer decided it needed to update Windows with 149 updates that had happened over the past year...this took well over 6 hours...another day lost!
6. So finally on day 3 of struggles - all was running well and I was pretty happy that I solved the problem, frustrated at the amount of work, but happy!
So I decided it was time to get in the Christmas spirit and strung my one strand of colored lights on the trailer, that night I quickly realized it was embarrassing compared to my neighbors...so a trip to Home Depot and a long strand of icicle lights and back to the trailer...got those hung up and decided while waiting for it to get dark and make final adjustments I would clean off the dinette from all the software installs and put all the disks away...well in the course of my cleaning I knocked a picture I had temporarily hung and of course it fell right on the screen of the laptop and it shattered the LCD display. So now the computer was running fine but I could not see the screen to operate any programs...DAMN!
Try and think of a solution and decided that a trip to Wal-Mart to buy an external monitor would solve the problem at least temporarily...so 30 mile round trip to Wal-Mart - plug in the monitor and it worked, spent an hour or so getting screen resolution set and some other crap and now I am operating the laptop with the external monitor and all is well again, except in my limited space the laptop and the monitor on the dinette is a little crowded, but it will do until I get a new LCD for the laptop.
We will start out with the happy pics....
Now the laptop screen!!
The good news is, I found a replacement LCD screen and detailed video on installation online and it is ordered and should be here right after Christmas - Just what I wanted for Christmas - but isn't the internet amazing...the video makes it look real easy...we shall see!
Now from the past a few fun photos I found while fixing my computer....
The above photo was taken in about 1956 or so of me and my family at Christmas! My Mom and Dad and my sister Beverly who is 4 years older.
I also found this drawing I made about the same time which my Mother saved for posterity!
Stay tuned for Christmas Week it will be a busy one here in the park and tomorrow I am headed to Palm Springs to meet up with old classmate Sherry Hathaway- Lewis....should be fun!!
Capt. Jim - "The Gypsy"
Traveling and photographing the Southwest and Alaska!
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