Two days ago, I got this dll error on my computer everytime I started it up. It said something to the effect that one of my ActiveX files was doing something Windows didn’t normally allow. It didn’t seem to affect anything we use the computer for but it had us worried. I had not install anything on the computer lately. My friend came over the day before and tried to install something earlier but we never even got to the installation screen because my DVD drive didn’t want to read the disk. We didn’t even come close to partially installing anything, so why was I getting a dll error? Could it be caused by something we got over the Internet? Was it a spyware? Was it a virus?
I panicked and tried to get rid of it. I downloaded the trial version of a software called RegistryFix. It took a few minutes to scan the whole system, after which it found 71 problems with ActiveX plus a few problems with other things. Great! I clicked on the “Repair Problems” button and it repaired like 3 of the problems. To repair the rest, I needed to get the full version of RegistryFix. The “Purchase Now” button brought me back to their website. It cost USD37.00.
I wasn’t going to pay that much to fix a few registry errors, so I abandoned that option.
I poked around with the included software that Hewlett Packard and Microsoft threw in with the computer. Tried a Restore Drivers application that came from HP. It didn’t get rid of the problem, but there was a “Restore PC” button. I vaguely remembered doing something like that before. My wife was asleep then, and I’d just taken some cold medication, so my mind wasn’t in any state to operate or repair any kind of machinery but I thought what the heck, I’ll just click the button and see what screen comes up.
The next thing I know, the computer has shutdown Microsoft Windows and I got a message saying it will restore all the included software back to its factory state and leave all the data untouched. Do I want to continue? Why, yes of course.
A progress bar pops up to say it’s saving the data. Cool. When that was done, it started reinstalling all the software. It also said something about a partition, although I was in no state to remember what it said regarding that. All was cool. I read a book while I waited for it to finish doing everything. It had a message saying if I needed to do that again in the future, I could just press F-11 at the startup screen. It took about thirty minutes. Seemed a bit long for it to do what it said it was doing, but I didn’t worry.
When it was done, it was asking me to enter a username and to configure windows, just like it did when I first bought the computer. I had a sinking feeling. I used Sim as the username as always and got through all the questions really quickly. I checked the “My Documents” folder and it was empty. I looked around in Document and Settings and there were a two folders in there that looked like where I should look – Sim and Sim.something. I looked in both and couldn’t find my old documents.
I think that was when my wife woke up. I told her what happened. She was immediately comforting and supportive. We’d lost a lot of our photos plus some written stuff we’d planned for the website. We’d lost all of our recent photos from Cape Town, South Africa. It was late at night but we called a friend of ours who knew everything there was to know about computers and it turns out he was in Dubai, but we kept talking. He told us chances were we could get back part of the data if we went to a forensics lab to get it out of the hard drive but since we mentioned the word “partition”, that was “Very Bad” and he didn’t like our chances. We were quite resigned to the fact that we’d lost all recent photos. My wife consoled me and we tried to stay positive. We thought about what we had and how great life was and decided it was time to let go of the lost photos. We went back to bed.
In the middle of the night, I got up and remembered that message about the computer doing some sort of data saving before it did the restore. I wasn’t sure if it was a dream or not. I turned on the computer and looked again. I couldn’t find the old documents. I looked everywhere. Nothing. My wife said let it go. We went back to sleep.
The next day was a bright and sunny day and we both agreed we would just have a good day no matter what. My wife called from her office and said I should take a break from the computer and the office and buy a new pair of climbing shoes to do some indoor climbing (like I had been saying I would do for the past year). She said she talked to technical support at her office and the guy said all the new HP notebooks have the evil F-11 thing that wipes out hard drives, so we should just forget about the photos. I still regretted not backing up the photos before trying something so dumb. It seemed such a simple and logical step, yet I skipped it. My wife said it was just the medication. It was time to let go.
I wanted to have one last look before I gave up. I poked around in “My Documents” and in the root directory and in “Documents and Settings” a little more. Again, I found nothing. I thought I was being thorough but there were just so many folders and none of them looked like what I needed. Somehow, I had the feeling I wasn’t being thorough enough. I just stared at the C: drive icon. Maybe out of habit or maybe something else, I right-clicked it to check for memory usage. An unusual amount of memory was being used up. Hmm.
I looked at which folders were using up so much space. It turned out to be Documents and Settings. Hmm. I looked at the folders under that. The Sim.something folder didn’t use up hardly any memory. The “Sim” folder however, had like 20Gb of stuff inside. Hmm. I looked at the memory usage for some of the folders under that (Desktop, Favorites, etc) and everything looked normal size but then I realized this folder didn’t have a “My Documents” folder. Instead it had what looked like a “Sim’s Documents” folder. It had the bulk of the 20Gb. The next logical step was to check the folders under that but I really didn’t need to because I recognized the names of the folders as soon as I looked at them. They were my old stuff. Every single last byte was there - backup files for the webpages, lists of things to do, our photos from South Africa, See Ming surrounded by flowers, me in a bathrobe, the rainy day when everything was grey, the blurred pictures of the crayfish. All there! I felt relieved, confused, and a little stupid, but all-in-all, I felt pretty good.
My wife and I celebrated with some Bah kut teh for dinner. Life’s great even if we had lost the photos, but not losing them – that was a sweet bonus.
I panicked and tried to get rid of it. I downloaded the trial version of a software called RegistryFix. It took a few minutes to scan the whole system, after which it found 71 problems with ActiveX plus a few problems with other things. Great! I clicked on the “Repair Problems” button and it repaired like 3 of the problems. To repair the rest, I needed to get the full version of RegistryFix. The “Purchase Now” button brought me back to their website. It cost USD37.00.
I wasn’t going to pay that much to fix a few registry errors, so I abandoned that option.
I poked around with the included software that Hewlett Packard and Microsoft threw in with the computer. Tried a Restore Drivers application that came from HP. It didn’t get rid of the problem, but there was a “Restore PC” button. I vaguely remembered doing something like that before. My wife was asleep then, and I’d just taken some cold medication, so my mind wasn’t in any state to operate or repair any kind of machinery but I thought what the heck, I’ll just click the button and see what screen comes up.
The next thing I know, the computer has shutdown Microsoft Windows and I got a message saying it will restore all the included software back to its factory state and leave all the data untouched. Do I want to continue? Why, yes of course.
A progress bar pops up to say it’s saving the data. Cool. When that was done, it started reinstalling all the software. It also said something about a partition, although I was in no state to remember what it said regarding that. All was cool. I read a book while I waited for it to finish doing everything. It had a message saying if I needed to do that again in the future, I could just press F-11 at the startup screen. It took about thirty minutes. Seemed a bit long for it to do what it said it was doing, but I didn’t worry.
When it was done, it was asking me to enter a username and to configure windows, just like it did when I first bought the computer. I had a sinking feeling. I used Sim as the username as always and got through all the questions really quickly. I checked the “My Documents” folder and it was empty. I looked around in Document and Settings and there were a two folders in there that looked like where I should look – Sim and Sim.something. I looked in both and couldn’t find my old documents.
I think that was when my wife woke up. I told her what happened. She was immediately comforting and supportive. We’d lost a lot of our photos plus some written stuff we’d planned for the website. We’d lost all of our recent photos from Cape Town, South Africa. It was late at night but we called a friend of ours who knew everything there was to know about computers and it turns out he was in Dubai, but we kept talking. He told us chances were we could get back part of the data if we went to a forensics lab to get it out of the hard drive but since we mentioned the word “partition”, that was “Very Bad” and he didn’t like our chances. We were quite resigned to the fact that we’d lost all recent photos. My wife consoled me and we tried to stay positive. We thought about what we had and how great life was and decided it was time to let go of the lost photos. We went back to bed.
In the middle of the night, I got up and remembered that message about the computer doing some sort of data saving before it did the restore. I wasn’t sure if it was a dream or not. I turned on the computer and looked again. I couldn’t find the old documents. I looked everywhere. Nothing. My wife said let it go. We went back to sleep.
The next day was a bright and sunny day and we both agreed we would just have a good day no matter what. My wife called from her office and said I should take a break from the computer and the office and buy a new pair of climbing shoes to do some indoor climbing (like I had been saying I would do for the past year). She said she talked to technical support at her office and the guy said all the new HP notebooks have the evil F-11 thing that wipes out hard drives, so we should just forget about the photos. I still regretted not backing up the photos before trying something so dumb. It seemed such a simple and logical step, yet I skipped it. My wife said it was just the medication. It was time to let go.
I wanted to have one last look before I gave up. I poked around in “My Documents” and in the root directory and in “Documents and Settings” a little more. Again, I found nothing. I thought I was being thorough but there were just so many folders and none of them looked like what I needed. Somehow, I had the feeling I wasn’t being thorough enough. I just stared at the C: drive icon. Maybe out of habit or maybe something else, I right-clicked it to check for memory usage. An unusual amount of memory was being used up. Hmm.
I looked at which folders were using up so much space. It turned out to be Documents and Settings. Hmm. I looked at the folders under that. The Sim.something folder didn’t use up hardly any memory. The “Sim” folder however, had like 20Gb of stuff inside. Hmm. I looked at the memory usage for some of the folders under that (Desktop, Favorites, etc) and everything looked normal size but then I realized this folder didn’t have a “My Documents” folder. Instead it had what looked like a “Sim’s Documents” folder. It had the bulk of the 20Gb. The next logical step was to check the folders under that but I really didn’t need to because I recognized the names of the folders as soon as I looked at them. They were my old stuff. Every single last byte was there - backup files for the webpages, lists of things to do, our photos from South Africa, See Ming surrounded by flowers, me in a bathrobe, the rainy day when everything was grey, the blurred pictures of the crayfish. All there! I felt relieved, confused, and a little stupid, but all-in-all, I felt pretty good.
My wife and I celebrated with some Bah kut teh for dinner. Life’s great even if we had lost the photos, but not losing them – that was a sweet bonus.
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