Month-end wrap up

I have stacks of laundry to be done. I have one basket of clean towels to be folded. I have another basket of clothes that are folded already, just waiting to be put away. I have dishes to be washed in the sink. Instead of handling any of those, I’m sitting on the couch, catching up online, sipping a glass of wine. It’s been a good month. I want to savor looking back for a moment.

My husband had some time off. Time off equates to not making money, which can often be a bummer. However, this recent time off was welcomed. It meant some serious reconnecting time, in the form of a Stay-cation. Exploring our own city. Going for a bike ride on our new bikes. A relaxing, romantic evening at Arrington Vineyards was perhaps the best part of it all, though.

A very special Opry. I always love going to the Opry, but George Jones’ 80th birthday was fantastic. Definitely goes down in my book as one of the coolest Opry nights I’ve ever been blessed to attend.

My parents came to visit. This is the reason for my latest hiatus. I opted to enjoy my time with my parents, while also balancing some extra nights working downtown. I seriously have the best parents ever, and I so enjoy every time they visit. We didn’t do too much while they were here, keeping it low key. And honestly? I loved that… just chilling with my parents. Who needs to run around all the time and end up exhausted? Relax. Enjoy. Live in the moment.

Texas A&M officially joining the SEC. I, for one, am excited. I’m a little nervous that we’ll struggle a few years against our new opponents, but I am so happy we’re facing the challenge. Sure, I’ll miss many of the rivalries of the Big 12. I hope we can schedule some of them non-conference… at least every few years! But I’m excited for this new venture. I’m excited to have my Aggies come to town. I’m excited to have games shown more locally. I’m excited to see my team on the local news. I’m just… excited!

All the good comes with a little bad. I’ve been fighting allergies for the last few weeks, and my new laptop is having issues. Fingers crossed a friend can fix the later tonight. The allergies… will just probably hang around another month.

September… you felt like a long month. But you were a good one. Here’s hoping October is a good one, too!

Looking for a little technical help

I’ve been very MIA this week on here, and I have good reason. My parents were in town, and I decided to unplug as much as possible while they were here.

As you possibly saw on my Wordless Wednesday post yesterday, Lightroom is in my hot little hands. JOY!!

Only, its not on my laptop. Because my 1.5 month old laptop decided to have the terrible twos and not load the program nor anything on CD/DVD. So, I come to my readers for some technical help. Here is what I posted to the HP forums looking for help there…

HP Pavilion g6-1b50us Notebook PC
Windows 7 64-bit

I’ve only had my laptop about a month and a half. To transfer items from my old laptop to the new one, I used the CD/DVD drive to copy items over. It worked beautifully at that time.

Tonight, I went to install a new program I just received. Its on CD-ROM. I placed it in the drive, it popped up with the “run or open” prompt. Pretty straight forward and normal. I clicked run/install and… the drive started making noises like it was either off balance or hung up or… something. After waiting much longer than it should have taken to read the disc, I just clicked the button to open the drive (and essentially cancel the install). No problem, the disc slowed like normal and the drive popped open.

Hmmm… So I did a reboot. Tried again. The run or open prompt came up. I canceled it this time, and went into the computer and right clicked the CD/DVD drive (where it showed the proper title of the disc) and clicked open. IT made the weird noises again and… nothing. I closed out the computer prompt, tried to open the drive again to stop it, and this time i had no luck. It just… sat there. So I ended up doing reboot.

Reboot. Got the disc out. Decided to try the disc in a different computer. Maybe I got a bad program. Nope. It worked like a charm, ready to install there.

I went BACK to my HP, tried the disc a third time. This time… nothing. No prompt. I went into Computer. No CD title in the CD drive. I clicked on it, and it started spinning (again making the weird hung up/off balance noise) and eventually came back saying there is no disc in the drive.

My various steps to fix things have included:

— making sure all the drivers, BIOS, etc. updates are installed. All are up to date.

— Did a system restore point a couple weeks back to see if that helped. No luck. Undid the restore point.

— Microsoft Fix-It thing. Couldn’t do anything because it would never read that there was a disc in the drive in the first place!

— Did HP System Troubleshooting. Same problem as the Microsoft Fix-It EXCEPT when I used a blank CD-R.

— Eventually did get it to also read a DVD-R disc. Seems willing to write to disc, but not read???

— Uninstalled the DVD/CD drive in Device Manager. Let it reinstall the drivers on its own.

— I’ve tried an audio CD, a video DVD, the program I am trying to install, and the blank discs. The only things it will read now if the blank discs. (And even then, it takes a few minutes to do that.)

In device manager, it is listed as “hp DVDRAM GT31L SATA CdRom Device.”

I’m at my wits end. ANY suggestions I’ve not tried?

Perhaps someone out there can help? Or do I just need to have it fixed under warranty? Or do I need to find a local IT person who can work their mojo on it for me? I prefer to fix it myself, if I can but I know I have limitations in my abilities. (If I didn’t, it would be fixed already, right??)

Help?