My Personal Blue Tsunami

I have my computer back and it is working

Techie brought it back two days ago after it underwent a heart transplant.  He was able to move almost everything to the new hard drive but the tiles were not working as they should.  I was unable to create tiles by pinning to start and was unable to delete tiles.

I figured that it was Microsoft’s new order of things and worked around it by pinning frequently visited sites to the Task Bar.  However  -  when I booted it up yesterday all my tiles were lined up and ready to go, prepared to be deleted and to be created and re-sized.  So, obviously all it needed was to be rebooted to get things up and running.

My next move had to be reloading Family Tree maker, a thing which I was not looking forward to.  I have a backup version of FTM-14 on CD but I had progressed to FTM-17 via download and free because I was prepared to try the Beta version.  I searched the FTM site for someway to reload FTM17 and eventually contacted the Support Line which sent me a link (not actually a link, just a URL) which I didn’t recognise as the way to go the first time they sent it to me.  However, they re-sent it and I was able to download FTM17.

The next problem was re-syncing FTM to Ancestry.com, something which I had been dreading having to do since is was difficult last time I had to do it after the BSOD 16 months ago.

BUT . . . after the download   -  and FTM recognised me  -  it asked if I wanted to sync with Ancestry and provided a link.  Presto  -  my Family Tree was back in FTM.  Yeah!!  I have over 1600 names and it would have been a very long job to even get the names back into FTM, let alone the sources so it was a huge relief and after sweating on it for days it turned out to be almost simple.

This morning I posted off the descendant line related to my father’s family to a first cousin once removed who doesn’t have a computer but is interested in family history.  The descendant chart has been sitting on my hall table for a couple of weeks so finally all appears to be well family and computer wise.

With luck there will be no more Blue Screens and all seems to be right with the world.