Thanksgiving and Computer stuff

As you know, Thanksgiving, the holiday, is over. Obviously since it was only one day. That day however, was a good one. Spent all afternoon at our friends house. We had lots of great food, including the Pecan and Pumpkin pies that Rain made for the occasion. Of course she also made brownies that were mainly for our friends. While there we played a couple of games of 'Life - Pirates of the Caribbean'. I won one of them when I played with E. and D. H. started that game, but opted out when/because she was too easily distracted by the movie that was playing on the television. We also talked and ate with A's mother in-law and son in-law.

I had to basically reformat the hard-drive on this computer. Luckily I didn't lose any program. All because I got the icon with the caption that I needed to activate (reactivate actually) my Windows operating system. But I couldn't get the computer to acknowledge that I was doing it. Clicking the icon didn't do anything except make the icon disappear, only to come back the next time the computer was restarted. I read online that if you could uninstall XP SP3 the system would revert back to SP2 and the icon would go away. However, since SP2 wasn't available, that didn't happen. I spent the next 2 days downloading SP2 and in the end went back to SP3 so that the defragment program would work the way it did before. Lots of Window's updates later it's finally (hopefully) back to normal. I've been seriously neglecting my Internet family. Since yesterday, also known as Sunday was my birthday, I didn't worry about them. In fact I was in a mood to take the weekend off of being online much at all except for downloading and reinstalling whatever I needed for the computer. A couple of weeks ago we bought some DVD-RW disks that have 4.7 GB of space. I was thinking at the time they'd be just like regular disks, but they're not. I found that out when I tried to save a full-system backup to one, only to have it (computer) say there was no disc in the disc player. Not real sure, but I think you need a program that converts files into DVD format, which I don't have. Actually, I downloaded something like that a few weeks ago, but I think it's since been deleted for some reason. Probably because I only downloaded it to get the Linux program Ubuntu onto disk. No, I haven't been successful with installing that because I get nervous when it comes time during the process the format the partition. I worry that I'm going to erase the current system by mistake, lose everything again, and have to reinstall everything. So I stop. Or I get brave and try, only to get an message saying there has been an error and the application was not complete and is being canceled.