On 1/26/2006, my system had a basic head crash. Thursday into
Friday, I leave the system on to run the full system scan Nortons anti virus.
When I came down in the morning, it had a 'blue screen of death'. When I
tried to reboot, there was a very sickening 'click-click-click'
sound. I had heard that before at the office. I was able to get a
replacement (even the same brand) at Best Buy when it opened at 10:00am. I
reloaded windows XP and the restored data from back up. That was when I found
NS not working. Then the whole weekend and week following, I slowly put
everything back together. I did need some help from Dell, since it wasn't
obvious as to what drivers need to be installed with the as purchased system. I
even had to run with dialup for a day or two, until I got the cable modem
working. XP requires most programs to be re-loaded to get them registered, so
as I find things not working I dig out the software and re-load. The good
news is that all of my data was backed up on Wednesday night, so I didn't lose
much. I had enough data losses when I worked, that I do backup religiously at
home. The last piece was Netscape 7.2. It just won't run. When I click the
icon from anywhere it may be, the program just exits. The funny thing was that
NS 4.8 and NS 8.1 worked, as did MSIE, Opera and the Earthlink browser/e-mail,
that I used for most of that week. It was OK, but didn't have all the bells and
whistles of NS. My biggest problem was not being able to get to my e-mail
address book, with almost 500 addresses. The data was there thanks to my
backup, but none of the programs I tried could use it as NS saved it. I did
some web browsing and found Mozilla,
on which NS is based. After a download and install, it felt like I was at home.
All my bookmarks, filters, and e-mail addresses were there. So after a week
and three days, I'm back to 100%.