PART 2 of Lydia's Laptop Woes ("Ka-Bluey!")

On Monday, Lydia was working on a speech/paper on her laptop after her last class at college. She had gotten about 2 hours into it, and "Ka-Bluey!" Her laptop crashed! Unfortunately, she hasn't learned to save, and save often, and relied on Word's auto-save!

When I found this out, my heart sank! I have personally learned to always click "save" when I have a pause, or when I hit a major part of a document... like the end of a well-written paragraph!

When Lydia brought up Word, after restarting the computer, it didn't recover her document. Boy, was she frustrated.

I wasn't too happy either. Here I thought I had fixed the problem! I guided her through the steps to see if the Windows Update was turned off... it wasn't! Somehow it turned itself back on. Well, she turned it off, but before she could do anything... "Ka-Bluey!" So she had to redo it again!

I then surmised that due to the slow internet speed at the college, it took forever to get to that "36%" of download... which is why it took almost two hours before crashing on her! Go figure!

When Lydia picked me up from work, you could see the frustration still on her face. I wasn't too happy either.. I knew it meant that she'd have to make up all that time she lost on her document. Ugh!

When we arrived home, I went straight to her laptop and come to find out, firefox had crashed so bad, I had to re-install it! MORE FRUSTRATION! But it didn't take to long, and all was working well. I then went to the folder to find the temporary files of Word's auto-save. Low and behold... there was a document last saved at 3:45.. right before the crash!

it was an ".asd" file. I tried to open it. No good. Word kept saying it wasn't able to read it. I searched on the internet to see if there was a program that would open it. All I could get was that it was a Word file! It wasn't helping my mood. I paused, thought for a moment, and changed the extension from ".asd" to ".txt" and opened it in notepad.

Voilà! It worked!!!

There was a bunch of miscellanies characters around the main copy, but all of Lydia's work was there! Talk about a "hero" moment! I felt like I had conquered a great feat!

Anyway, Lydia was able to finish her work, and we installed "Service Pack 2" by downloading the exe file my brother had given me the link for. Hopefully the laptop crashing is over!!!!

~Matt