Saturday was relax day - took it easy and didn't do much of anything, except screw up my computer again. *sigh*
The problem was that it will not shut down. It goes thru the motions, pretends to shut down, then halts at a light blue blank screen. After about a minute, the HD stops activity and the light in the optical mouse goes off. This is when I have been just turning it off. I would prefer it turn itself off like it used to before I installed the APC PowerChute software.
So, in an effort to tinker some more, I uninstalled Powerchute! Well, actually, add/remove programs has that 'stutter' when you first bring it up while it is loading, then it refreshes once fully loaded. I clicked on Powerchute, chose remove, then it refreshed and selected Direct CD for me, so that when I said Yes, it uninstalled Direct CD. I love computers. Patty asked what all the shouting was about.
So, last night at around 8pm, I got DirectCD and the Adaptec EasyCD reinstalled, but they wouldn't run. Couldn't initialize engine. Google is your friend. Several sites said simply to reinstall EasyCD and ignore the dire warnings that you really should remove it before re-installing it. So I installed it over top of itself, and sure enough, this fixed the problems and I once again have full CD-R/CD-RW powers. And the computer still won't shut down by itself.
Strangely enough, during the reinstall of EasyCD, the system rebooted by itself. Normally on a restart it gets to the lt blue screen and hangs, and I have to hit reset, but during the last reinstall it actually restarted correctly. Of course afterwards it still locks up on reboot. Ah well. But there is hope there. It is capable of doing it correctly, I just need to figure out why it is not getting the right signals.
I also installed Deus Ex. Haven't played at all, but got it installed.