…it took till nearly midnight to convince my laptop that YES I wanted the hard drive formatted! It isn’t as easy as you might think, and I don’t have the wherewithal to go into it here, so I won’t!

I’ll just refer you here, which is one of the many geeky sites I had to refer to to figure this out.

As of this writing, I’ve installed Windows XP (circa 2002, meaning once you get it going, it has to download a billion updates), plus the Service Pack 2 from a CD I have. Then I configured the machine back onto our home wireless network so I can start downloading the anti-virus software — the culprit that got me in trouble in the first place!

So it’s downloading…we’ll see from there.

IN THE MEANTIME —

I got to bed about 12:30am last night after I got the laptop to start formatting the hard drive. I’ve done worse when faced with rebuilding our computers, so I was pleased with that.

2:09am: Jake comes to my room to tell me he got sick. All those cinnamon rolls. Why did I let him have 3??? At least his barf smelled like cinnamon — really, it did.

2:12am: I’m hauling my Bissel Green Machine upstairs to clean up the mess. I’ll give Jake credit: he leaned over and made his mess on the floor, his bed was fine! There’s a couple spots on the SIDE of the bed, which I’m dealing with today, but things were good enough that he could go back to sleep right away.

2:32am: By the time I’m done with all this, Jake had gone back to sleep. Phew!

2:36am: Back in bed. Hard to sleep with computer problems and a sick son on my mind.

6:50am: Timmy’s poking my face to tell me he’s awake.

Jake mainly has an upset stomach, with no other symptoms of illness. He’s staying home from preschool today, tomorrow’s pajama day, so he don’t want to miss that!