dongrant wrote:
I see the advice that you have been given here as good sound advice and the thing that scares me is that it sounds of if you have already tried a lot of it. If so it appears as if the time may be fast approaching when you must chose between one of four options. One, jump off the bridge by reinstalling the OS.
Two, get a Mac and start all over.
Three, sent the machine to a good local computer repair shop ( good luck finding one of those) and leave it there until it is fixed.
Four, start uninstall every app that is not critical. Most computers are overloaded with useless junk anyway. You may have something that runs in the background and you are totally unaware of it. Not uncommon with Windows apps Adobe in particular will do this. MicroSoft may be the evil empire, but after working the last 10 years as senior QA analyst I can tell you that Adobe caused us almost as much problems as the OS.
I see the advice that you have been given here as ... (
show quote)
If only I hadn't done almost all of that already.
I just got this computer a few months ago and bought with it the full boat warranty, so Dell WILL fix it. No ifs buts or maybes. The issue is not that it will be fixed, but how much of a mess of my life will it make.
I have every single startup file turned OFF except for virus protection. I religiously defrag and back up. I uninstall anything I don't actually USE or which the computer needs to function. Most of my apps are photographic: Photoshop, Canon's native software, Olympus's native software, PaintShopPro.
I run OpenOffice (not MS Office), Outlook, Quicken, Canon's printer software, Audible Manager for audio books. Blackberry desktop (well, I have a blackberry!), Adobe Reader, and Google Chrome. CA Anti-Virus and CA PC Tune Up (AKA PitStop) for maintenance tasks. And that's it. No games, no frills, nothing I don't actually use.
That's why this is so aggravating. I do all the right things, but here I am again. I do not even know if the phantom device my computer "sees" is really the cause of the problem, only that it COULD be. My computer hasn't crashed today, which is good. But I haven't been using for much, either so I'm not sure what, if anything, that proves.
I considered a Mac, but I have an huge investment in PC software. And thing is, this was running beautifully, not a glitch or a hiccup and then, wham. The tech guy thinks it was a microsoft update that zapped me. Great.
Anyway, ordered another 1TB external and as soon as it arrives, going to back up entire system and create a mirrored image of the hard drive ... not that I really believe it will accomplish anything, but it's worth a try. I will nurse this along until I'm done with my current project. After that, I'll reload the operating system. I may even upgrade and get Win 7 Professional. What I need is a better graphics board but I can't upgrade it because of the design of this all-in-one wireless beast that LOOKS like a Mac, but isn't.
I have as of this writing, done absolutely everything short of reloading the system, so it either works or I'm screwed.