Just a heads up...

My laptop is acting funny. It's starting to 'lock up' when I turn it on and get past the sign in screen. This last time when I turned it off, it took 20 minutes to shut everything down, I had to re-ask it to shut off, and I left it stuck on the 'saving your settings' screen for 45 minutes before I gave up and unplugged it and took out the battery to shut it off completely.

This means, if it continues doing this, I could very well be without a computer for at least a couple of weeks while I try and figure out what's wrong with it.

And if it's trashed, it could be quite a while before I can replace it at all (I'm not counting on Dad to buy me a whole new computer, which is what would have to happen if I needed to get a new one, since my finances won't allow for even a cheapie $300 placebo unit until I could afford the upgrades in vid cards and the like so I could do things like WoW...).

BTW, Geekie, I did read your posts and I loved them...and would have said so this morning if the laptop hadn't decided to pull this. :)

Anyway, under our new management, I don't feel comfortable enough to get online at work (I'm praying under my breath ATM that this sign on won't get me in trouble...), so yeah, it may be a while before you guys see me anywhere online.

I'll keep you updated as I can. *hugs*.

Update...

Well, I'm not sure what happened, but after three hours I turned the lappy on again, and this time it didn't have too much problem with letting me into email (although it tried to tell me I didn't have enough memory to run the office assistant, even though I'm still at 36% open room on the disk drive).

Ran disc clean and then defrag a few times in a row as suggested by a computer geek work friend, and now Hal seems to be running ok (even though I run all that stuff every weekend...). There hasn't been any problems since the clean up, and everything is running at the normal 'fast' speed, so I'm not sure what's up. I am wondering if I should take it in to Frys this weekend or something anyway for a diagnostic.

Anyway, so at least for now, it looks like the computer scare is over. We'll see what happens when I have to shut it down and take it home in an hour, I guess.

If anyone has any idea as to what may have happened, let me know.

Update the second...

From what I can tell, the problem is with my antivirus--chunks of it have apparently decided to go the way of the dodo. The good (somewhat) news is that I was due for my yearly upgrade/renewal anyway and they handle it by pretty much replacing the whole program for you with the newest version as part of the deal.

So once the old program finishes its scan (or I shut the computer off in a fit of frustration), I'll proceed with the install of the newest version. Which, hopefully, will fix the apparent problem (which has also started to include the firewall portion of the program not functioning).