The mystery of it all. . .

Yeah, a mystery. I have this neat, well maybe not so neat anymore, "SmartDisk." It plugs into one of the USB ports and is a 120 Giga Byte hard drive. And it comes with a program called "Bounce Back." Bounce Back pops up evey 7 days and says, "Check me out." It goes out and determines what has changed on the basic computer hard drive and backs it up on the SmartDisk. Super, Right?

Well not so super. If you do not back up on the seventh day, it dutifully comes up when you boot up telling you to back up the data. You can punch it off. You do not have to back up on that seventh day if you do not want to. But what I have found out is that about two or three days of punching it off and it disappears. The hard drive has case light so I know it is getting power but my computer OS (XP of course) has lost it. I can not find it (Could this be another MicroSoft conspiracy?). That means I either have to go back some time and restore my registry or erase "Bounce Back." and then reinstall the SmartDisk (and Bounce Back). Sure enough, the computer then finds it, down loads Bounce Back off the SmartDisk and we are off and running again, except that it starts from ground zero and backs up the entire hard disk - takes a while. I should know better by now to let it back up when it wants to not when I want to do it.

I have two programs that seem to not like the SmartDisk. One is Norton Utilities and the other is a spyware blocker. I think maybe the virus checker does not like it either. Don't know but the logic seems to me that anything that pops up like Bounce Back these programs think is a viurus or some kind of spy ware (perhaps it shares the same logic as viruses of some sort like Trojan Horse). And given a little time they conspire to get rid of the Bounce Back operation.

So I guess I will go to "restore" and reload it from a month or so back and see if that is a quick fix or then erase Bounce Back and start over again. Irritating, isn't it?

Ciao