Thursday, April 1, 2010

PC brain surgery and other hair-raising adventures





Many thanks indeed to author Linda Hines for her very kind permission to upload these images, which illustrate one of her most popular characters, Emeric von Gondrecourt. I did these images -- and many more! -- specially for Linda, and you could say this is my "hour of need!" I've utterly run out of stashed images to post ... and today's the day!

What day, you ask? The day this computer was literally taken to pieces and put back together again in working order! A full defrag (three hours), a full system restore (two hours), install anti-virus software and run it in-depth (two hours). Result: turns out I had sixteen viruses hiding in here!! AVG let the whole lot in, which is not hood news, because I've always trusted AVG. We switched over to AVG when McCaffee and Norton turned out to be worse than useless.

These days, even AVG is getting left behind. Now, Avast is the anti-virus software which found the nasties and rooted them right out. Great software ... but golly, they're a damned hard company to deal with. We've been trying to get this fifty-dollar software to install since Saturday. Today is Thursday ... finally, finally, they replied to a message sent five days ago! I can genuinely recommend the software, but before you lay down your fifty bucks, be aware that the company's tech support crew lives in a time warp. If things don't go according to plan, you'll be ripping out your hair before you get any help.

Anyway, better late than never ...!

So, this quad core has had a full defrag, system restore and virus scan. It's clean, and it's running lickety-split fast. Alas, I have no installed software as yet! DAZ, Bryce, Serif X3 ... all this will have to be reinstalled tomorrow, along with the printers and scanners ... and about 100 DAZ models.

So I would like to thank Linda very much indeed for her permission to post some of the art done specially for her. It's a life saver!

With a teeny little bit of luck I should be back tomorrow with new renders...

Jade, 1 April (April Fool's Day ... at least till noon!)