Every now and then it becomes necessary to just start over!  I encountered one of those times over the last 4 or so weeks.  It all started as the performance on my computer degraded to the point that I felt compelled to do something about it.  After exhausting my ability, I contacted HP support and began an interesting and sometimes frustrating experience.  HP has strong customer service and to no fault of theirs it became increasingly obvious that the only real solution was to start over.  The process began with backing-up all of my data files – documents, pictures, videos and music – basically anything that was not a program file.  As an aside, my Western Digital “My Passport” proved to be invaluable.  With its 1 TB capacity and smooth operation it handled this task with aplomb.  Back to the story.  For some reason the Recovery Drive partition on the computer had become corrupted so the only option was to order a Recovery Disk set from HP.  Once received I inserted the disk and watched everything on my computer disappear!  I did not want to ghost my drive for fear of  reintroducing whatever was causing the performance problems.

I forgot to mention that we have two homes situated about 1,800 miles apart.  As luck would have it all of my software documentation and disks were at the home 1,800 miles away.  We have an individual that checks our house and I had him locate what I needed and ship it to me here in Minnesota.

With a clean slate the next task was to upgrade Windows Vista to Windows 7 something that is not difficult only takes time.  After that, reload all of the program files, some on disk some stored on the aforementioned Passport drive.  Finally a month or so after starting the process, I have my computer back to usable condition and the performance is back to an acceptable level.  I guess the  moral of the story is that while this process is time consuming and can be fraught with problems the payoff makes it worthwhile.  By way of history, the computer is about 1 and 1/2 years old and my tendency to try new things -ie. downloading items from the internet –  more than likelihood contributed to the degradation in the performance.

If you have experiences similar to this I would like to hear from you on how you addressed the problem.