Ice cold in Outlook...

My apologies for the fact that blogging has been somewhat light lately, (Lightlately sounds like a Dickens character from some Highland craggy castle - "Och Miss Lightlately, yooor arms are sooo heiry and strong fro' the washing of the Tweeds..."..."Tha's because it's Misterrrr Dougal Lightlately..."); but unlike Cranmer, the black hole I've been staring into has been the screen on my computer.

You see, my 'work' PC has been giving my backside the earache for some weeks now; Mrs S's PC sings like a bird, and although it has the dreaded Vista, we can make it do what we want after a few clops round the mouse, and perhaps a Hob Nob, but my PC has had a serious sulk in the Outlook department, which I use exclusively for business. In fact, I'm quite a dab hand at Outlook, although it's not the latest version, and although I'm not really a techie, definitely not a geek, I reckon I can turn the mitts to most things.

(Well, except where mains electricity is prevalent, especially after I pulled 30 amps from the back of the cooker while poking around inside, and it chucked me across to the other side of the kitchen with a loud squawk, and caused Mrs S some anguish while she gently folded her twitching husband into the recovery position, which was interesting...). Oh and also I'm buggered if I can work out why the bottom of our frost-free freezer accumulates ice quicker that the Great Scandinavian Glacier. In fact, it may not be long before the whole of the Turrets will be encased in a bloody great blue ice cube, eventually sliding downhill and probably reaching Bodiam Castle by 2015! But I digress.

My Outlook programme, which contains carefully filed emails from business acquaintances, decided to get nasty, and after getting into a serious hump last week, stopped working altogether. I'd been backing everything up over the past few days onto one of those hard disks from PCWorld, which hold about 500 squillobytes of kit, and had just finished the final upload, when the programme crashed around my ears.

It was smouldering and very upset with something or other...

The good people at 'Computeractive' and also 'Daniweb', had been spending some considerable time to try and sort out the problem of 'Outlook freezing', (there you are, freezers again...), with helpful advice and attempts to solve the problem, but nope; none of the ideas worked, and my PC still (probably) had a corrupt PST file flying around inside like a fart in a colander, intent on causing mayhem and destruction.

My language had deteriorated to the utterly obscene, ranging from Early Connolly, through Anglo Saxon Woss, and finally becoming Normal Geldof, and at one stage, after one particularly spectacular incident, JRT ran from my office with both front paws clasped over her ears, growling concernedly, and Mrs S was beginning to wonder why she could'nt commence beating me round the head with several garden implements.

So I reinstalled Windows! Yup; the modern day equivalent of driving your mother's Jaguar into a passing church service for confused parish councillors...

Just like that; all done in a day and it isn't anything like as painful as you'd expect, as long as you've saved all the important stuff of course. You wouldn't believe how much crap and rubbish my poor old PC had accumulated over the few years of it's existence! There were old programmes long forgotten, bits of smut from chums (thanks a bunch Roger, next time send it without sound...), some files duplicated to hero proportions, a piece of software for some kit which I never knew existed, some mail from a nice Nigerian wanting to use my bank, and a cache of stuff from some adventure game I'd been given years ago, which after spending about six months solving all the clues, ended up in a cellar under a station in blind terror with some chanting Acolytes from a Dan Brown story!

And now, I can log on with lightning speed, the hard disk has 40% less junk on it, which just shows how I'm not really that good at chucking things away, and Outlook downloaded 3016 emails from my server with a few quiet clicks and a huge sigh of relief... And I can also listen to music again as the sound system had originally packed up, so I'm feeling pretty proud I can tell you!

But I do want to get all my pictures back on, because my favourite one of JRT, before she came to live with us, is still in the HD, and I want that back pretty soon as a desk top...