I’m Back – photo by adihrespati

If you have been wondering, “where the hell is my weekly UCP podcast?!” – you were not alone.  I received a few emails asking what was going on and very kindly inquiring if I was okay.  I was fine, but my laptop (a.k.a. Command Central) on the other hand, was not okay.

I have been having problems with my wifi and had recently gone back to hardwiring my computer into the back of my router.  I think was getting weird glitches on the computer and a lot of unwanted toolbars added.  It seems to me that my laptop probably just had a virus or some malware issues.  So I got on Youtube and starting watching videos on “how to remove malware.”

I gave fixing my computer myself the “old college try” but to no avail.  My laptop was suffering from problems that were beyond my skill level and pay scale.  So I hire an expert to get things squared away.  My computer expert is a bona fide computer wiz (he really has an IT job) – but he repairs people’s private computers as a side gig.  One the wiz was on the job it became apparent that my laptop woes were bigger than I had anticipated. Here is a snippet of the bad news:

During the course of backing up your data, I noticed there were some problems reading some of the files from the hard drive. I suspected the hard drive itself may have some bad sectors, so I ran a diagnostic tool on it, and it has found some. Due to the nature of how hard drives work, they have extra backup sectors, and this tool will basically disable the bad ones and use the backups. It has already found several, and it’s only about 5% into the scan. This would certainly explain the corrupt stuff in your Windows installation. You can keep using the computer like this, however, a drive with any bad sectors is usually well on its way to completely breaking, and if this were my laptop, I would buy a new hard drive for it to replace the faulty one….

 Ugh. It turned out that “some bad sectors” on the hard drive was 90+ bad sectors.  So I ended up having to replace out the hard drive and reload and configure everything back to normal.  The computer wiz did great work, but with the holiday season and this only being a side gig for him, the turn around on getting my computer back and fixed was longer than anticipated.

Anyhoo – I am back now, and with a vengeance … or at least some gusto.  Thank you for your understanding and patience as I essentially was getting my laptop refurbished. I am sorry to have been gone so long.