I apologize for not having the next comic finished yet. I had finished inking the first panel and decided to take a break. Then I thought I’d upgrade a particular program since a new version had come out. Just a little side trip while I took a brake, I thought. I followed the instructions that said that the program must be completely uninstalled before installing the new version. Then it happened. I was uninstalling it, whistling away like it’s no big deal, and suddenly Windows slowed to a crawl and the uninstall crashed. Now that the first uninstall attempt got messed up, I couldn’t get the uninstall to work at all. So I was left with shreds of the program left, like a nasty weed when you can’t get all the roots. You may know how Windows programs are. And this program was so tenacious that Windows wouldn’t load properly with it messed up like that. Or possibly it damaged Windows in the process. I’ve seen that many times too. All I could do was go into safe mode with no internet. So I used every trick I knew, carefully deleted all traces I could find of it in the registry, repaired the registry, deleted the mention of the program in the startup, deleted all its files. I had info from the software makers how to delete what was left, but it was to no avail. The failed uninstall had damaged Windows and my network settings, and try as I might Windows just wouldn’t work. Thankfully I was able to back up all my stuff (almost…there’s always something forgotten
Finally, I had no choice but to reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows. On the bright side (if you can call it that) the old install of Windows hadn’t really been working that well anyway so it’s actually nice to have a fresh install. And this time I broke my hard drive up into partitions so that I wouldn’t have to reformat the whole thing if the worst happens again.
But the pain in the neck of all this is that it’s taken me two days to get everything back up and running and all the software reinstalled. I’m finally finished, more or less, and everything is where it should be. I’ve been using Mozy to backup my comic files off site so they were safe anyway. Thus is my adventure in Windows land. Just as a side thing, I’m running XP, not Vista. I refuse to use Vista. My mom has it and hates it.
I realize all you Mac users out there are just shaking your heads and thinking that’s why I should have a Mac. I actually would have one if they weren’t so expensive. Maybe someday I’ll be able to afford a Macbook. If it weren’t for the fact that Adobe software is so expensive and that they make you buy everything anew if you want to make the switch, I would have gotten one. Oh, well. Maybe eventually. In the meantime I’ll just have to deal with XP.
