Silver Linings

Suddenly in mid-November an ominous blue warning screen appeared here on Diana's monitor screen, and I could not get past it no matter what I tried. Suggestions and references from people much more knowledgeable than I came in, and all seemed really sensible, but none of my attempts quite made it. "Unmountable boot volume" was the heading on the blue screen, and it would not budge. I limped along with poor Herkimer for basic e-mail for several days and finally called in a service technician for the bad news....the hard drive had to be replaced. Of course I lost pictures and files, but many of those had already had been posted on our heritage and group sites and thus can be retrieved.
Getting the basic services reinstalled has taken up much of a week's time, with frustrating setbacks along the way. But in the process I reviewed a number of small but important details, and I have learned to watch more alertly for the little signals that are often main clues.
The replacement hard drive has twice the capacity, and best of all I realized I could load all of the ISP's onto DSL to dispense with dialup altogether. Silver linings...........this cloud had more than one.
Meanwhile, Diana's sister Regina arrived, with her lovely 20 inch ultrasharp flat panel monitor.
The networking adventure begins.