Netbook Problems Solved

I had a problem with the new ASUS Netbook that I bought to replace the Lifebook on the road. With the 160GB hard drive, this one is now my primary computer. Unfortunately, after a crash last month, it slowed down. Way down. For example, when booted it used to take about 30 seconds to get to the desktop. After the crash, it was taking four minutes. Even the sound was garbled. This was really annoying me but any warranty work is done directly with ASUS so I was reluctant to take this route.

Finally, Friday, I took the DVD that came with it and reinstalled XP back to square one. That fixed it, so the problems must have stemmed from a corruption of the operating system in some way. Then I spent much of the rest of the day reinstalling all the programs and utilities I had added and trying to remember what preferences I preferred. Then I set a manual restore point to possibly help if this happens again.

Energized, I finally installed the speech recognition software that came with the voice recorder. It still needs to be trained, but I can do that on the trip. Then I loaded all the songs I had on DVD's and reorganized them. The library stands at about 12,000 now. I even downloaded a few we were missing (mostly Rascal Flatts for Sandy) form Puretracks. She was building a collection of her music for the Zumo.

So the hardware and software are ready to travel.

(I wonder how we ever travelled before computers?) :-)