And the Lord said, "Hey, why don't I throw rocks at someone? It'll be fun!"
So . . . the attempts at system restore were unsuccessful. Dad, to his credit, spent a significant amount of time trying to undo the damage. His theory is a virus got in and corrupted the file(s) in question, and one of his antivirus programs deleted it/them. At present, his advice is to talk to my brother and ask him to fuss with the Windows restoration disk, on the assumption that the Microsoft Works installation program is on it.
My brother is not one of those people I can talk with easily.
Also, I am not entirely sure that running that disk won't wipe everything clean---which I REALY REALLY DON'T WANT.
The replacement programming is $99 at Best Buy. Dad is disinclined to buy it for me, since it is (to him for whom talking to my brother is easy as cake and ice cream) pointless to spend $100 to buy something that I already have. I am disinclined to buy it because, well, it's $100---which, granted, is probably most of his disinclination too.
So I am faced with the twin disagreeable tasks of getting my brother to fix my computer---again---and attaching to emails all the endless multitudes of pictures, songs, files, and other things that I've accumulated over the past three years.
Yay.
My brother is not one of those people I can talk with easily.
Also, I am not entirely sure that running that disk won't wipe everything clean---which I REALY REALLY DON'T WANT.
The replacement programming is $99 at Best Buy. Dad is disinclined to buy it for me, since it is (to him for whom talking to my brother is easy as cake and ice cream) pointless to spend $100 to buy something that I already have. I am disinclined to buy it because, well, it's $100---which, granted, is probably most of his disinclination too.
So I am faced with the twin disagreeable tasks of getting my brother to fix my computer---again---and attaching to emails all the endless multitudes of pictures, songs, files, and other things that I've accumulated over the past three years.
Yay.