Breakfast with Aunt Emmy and Uncle Dick
This morning, the four oldest and Mom drove over to The Courtyard Buffet near the Mississippi River in order to meet up for breakfast with Mom’s Aunt Emmy and Uncle Dick. We had a really great time there, talking and eating. It was actually the first time we’ve been to this buffet, and I was really impressed. They have a big spread — doughnuts, eggs, French toast, sausage, bacon, oatmeal, Cream Of Wheat, fruit, hashed browns, Belgian waffles, omelettes — to name a few. The price is pretty nice, as I think it’s $6.99 a head, and it includes drinks, such as soda, orange juice or milk. Anyway, the food was delicious, and we had a really fun time getting to spend a couple of hours with Aunt Emmy and Uncle Dick. We have really grown closer to them the past couple of years. Uncle Dick is a retired electrical inspector, and he was an incredible amount of help to us when we were wiring our house.
Unfortunately, I had to spend several more hours today working on Dad’s laptop. Not that I mind fixing it; it was just frustrating that the problems were still persisting. Basically, his laptop would freeze randomly throughout the day, so he asked me to see what I could do about it. What’s tough is there was absolutely no rhyme or reason to the freezing, which makes it extremely difficult to diagnose.
I ended up wiping the hard drive clean (formatting it), and then I installed Windows XP. My hope was that I would be able to “emulate” Windows 98 while XP was running, and that emulating 98 would enable Dad to run the software that he uses that is incompatible with Windows XP.
Unfortunately, that didn’t work. XP worked perfectly on his laptop, but the program just wouldn’t behave properly when it was being run through a “virtual” Windows 98. So I had to go back to the drawing board and format the hard drive again.
After that, I proceeded to, yet again, reinstall Windows 98 and started loading the drivers, transferring Dad’s file back across the network. His computer is now at the point where I think it’s working, but it’s just hard to tell right off the bat since the main problem was random freezing. I didn’t encounter any of that, but I only have the laptop for several hours. I’m praying that whatever I did set the laptop straight and that Dad won’t have to deal with the computer freezing anymore!
Well, I suppose I’d better head out. Thank God for Sundays!! What perfect timing. =)