you are everything

My earlier post? About my sound card having died? WRONG! I've never been so happy to be stupid in all my life. hahahahahaha

So, my sound card is a Creative Soundblaster Live. So I was on the Creative site looking through their knowledge base, and found something about a "Digital Output Only" checkbox in the sound card's settings. I hadn't really noticed it before, even though I looked at that very screen on my 'puter a couple of times at least. See, the thing is... speakers and earphones? Not digital output. I don't have anything connected to my computer that uses digital output. So if the "Digital Output Only" box is checked, um... no analog output will occur. Thus, speakers and earphones will produce no sound.

Now, I honestly have no clue how that box got checked, because I wasn't even doing anything sound-related at the time the loss of sound happened. I was burning a data dvd (and btw, my dvd burner... it don't need no sound card or speakers to make lots of noise on its own ::nods::). Anyway, if you have a Soundblaster card and are curious, the box in question can be found on the Speaker Settings screen.

So...
Me = Stupid
Me = Happy
Me = Saved $100+
Me = Really Happy
Me = Hearing Brian say "the excitement" again every time a new email comes in! YAY!

See icon (by the v. talented paddies of course).
So... the computer is back up and running beautifully with Windows completely up to date and some of my critical, must-have apps installed. PLUS I was able to put my old hard drive in as a secondary, and I can access all of my old files! I lost nothing! But time. And a few handfuls of hair that I ripped out. But I think most of the lost hair was replaced by more gray hair coming in. Sad but true.

However, I cannot complain, because I still have all of my files!!! And I didn't have to let some stranger see what's on my hard drive. ::snickering::

Of course it's going to take quite a while to get all of my favorite programs reinstalled and set up the way I want them, but that's life, right? I feel like I just moved and have a ridiculous number of boxes to unpack and tons of items to sort through and now I just have to figure out where to put everything. LOL

I must thank larissa_j for her computer expertise and assistance. BTW, don't think I didn't notice that you ignored that last question I asked you! The non-computer question. Yeah, you know which one I'm talking about. LOL

Of course, now I have a million things to catch up on, and I don't even know where to start. If there's something I'm supposed to be doing for you, feel free to remind me. And... um... I think that's all. Later!

Posting this from Dad's computer.

Can't boot up at all. Even in safe mode. I can get in to run a few tests by using various CD-Roms like the XP reinstall disk (which is also supposed to repair, but doesn't seem to be able to fix my problem) and my Norton SystemWorks disk (no viruses at least). In depth hard drive scans all show that the hard drive itself is fine. Surface scan of the hard disk itself came back fine. Appears to be a problem with the boot sector or something like that. Which I no nothing about. Did some research on Mom's computer yesterday - just left me more confused. Initially, I was trying to fix a problem with the LiveUpdate program that's part of Norton SystemWorks. Their tech support finally told me I had to uninstall, delete a bunch of files that they specified, and then reinstall. Never got to the reinstall part. Tried running System Restore to at least restore back to before I uninstalled SystemWorks, but then I got... yep, a Blue Screen of Death^TM. And not just any Blue Screen of Death^TM, but one that was obviously generated outside of Windows. Had a distinct DOS look to it, though it was (is) actually still blue.

Here's the actual, full text of the Blue Screen of Death^TM I get: ( cut so as not to bore you all )

There are no viruses. I don't have any newly installed hard drives or controllers or anything like that. If there is such a thing as CHKDSK /F, my computer doesn't want to run it, but I was able to run CHKDSK /P. It said the only other variable for CHKDSK was /R for repair. Not sure what to try next.

Anyway, trying to get on either Mom's or Dad's computer once a day or so to check email, but that's about it.

One slightly more upbeat piece of news... we changed my VNS settings so they're back to a tolerable level - no more pain and trouble breathing. And... would have been nice to be aware of this before, but apparently I'm still receiving the same therapeutic level I was when I was having the pain and trouble breathing. ::sigh:: I still wonder if it's ever going to be worth all this trouble.