Up and running again (mostly)

As it turned out, when I contacted the suppliers of my refurbished PC to arrange for it to be shipped in for repairs, they offered to send me a replacement pre-imaged hard drive that would have a copy of the same Windows 7 operating system on it, so that I could swap it out myself. That would certainly take less time than sending the laptop back in and waiting to get it back, so I went for that. After all, I’d seen the guy at Best Buy take the hard drive out to inspect it, so I knew how to do it. Two weeks passed and no drive came, so I complained, and it arrived two days after that. I was uneasy that it had been sent in just a padded envelope instead of something sturdier, but I installed it today and it seems to be working fine. And since I just did all this a bit over a month ago, I was able to do it more efficiently this time, though it still took forever for some of the software to download from the Internet, so it took all afternoon and then some. (Though this time I backed up and copied my documents with a thumb drive rather than using the network connection between PCs, and it was far, far faster, as I’d hoped.)

Some stuff will have to wait until tomorrow, but I’ve now got the essential stuff reinstalled and working — except for my e-mail client program, eM Client. For some reason, when I installed a new copy and tried overwriting its mailbox data files with the up-to-date ones from the old drive (which I’d copied onto my old laptop as a backup and transferred back from there), it led to some kind of malfunction in the program and it crashed. I still have the data on my old computer; I just need to figure out how to get it working on my new-new computer. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong this time that’s different from when I transferred the data files the other way. I really hope I can get it figured out tomorrow. I need to get past these computer troubles once and for all so I can get back to work on my writing.