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After a good solid week of headaches related to Win 7, system restore, and corrupted USB port drivers, after completing a repair install yesterday all seems to be back to normal.

This morning when I turned on the machine I found four restore points – the test one I made late last night and three others that were created during the repair install. So… it seems like the problems are gone… Fingers still crossed, but for now, okay.

I’m working on the new Loveland Habitat for Humanity website today and have found a few useful WordPress tutorials I though I’d pass along.

I needed to display Habitat’s Google Calendar on their Events page; this tutorial on integrating WP and Google Calendar is very easy to follow.

I also needed to create two donation forms with Paypal buttons. This tutorial from NetTuts did the trick – I used the resulting form in my footer template and a variation of it on a page in the site.

My Windows 7 saga may be coming to a close.

During last night’s tech support call with Microsoft, I was instructed to do a repair install, an in-place upgrade of Windows 7 using the Win7 DVD. I didn’t even know I could do this.

I tried this four times. The first two times, it got halfway through (that’s about an hour) and never rebooted as it was supposed to. I rebooted it manually; that did not work and it took a while to get back into Win7.

The third time, I thought to turn off the firewall because it was giving me permissions messages when the install started. The tech support person neglected to mention this to me). This time, when it got to the point where it was hanging, it actually did reboot – but not all the way. It took me into the boot menu among other places and again failed to restart where it left off.

Then I found this excellent Windows 7 repair install tutorial on the Windows 7 forums.  I tried it the process once more with both the firewall and antivirus turned off. Same thing – it rebooted, but not all the way.  Frustrated (to say the least) I gave up and turned off the machine.

So this morning, when I turned it on, right after the ‘Starting Windows’ screen I see an ‘Upgrading Windows’ screen. 10 seconds later I’m back where it left off last night. I have no idea why it worked, but I’m certainly not complaining.

Once it finished up, I went back to the tutorial and followed the steps listed. Everything appeared to be fine, I just had to redo my settings for monitors, type, etc., nothing major.

And then the first big test – did the external hard drive, which Win7 has failed to recognize since last Sunday, actually work?

It DID! So something good is definitely happening.

I’m imaging the main internal drive right now before I do step 18 in the tutorial – disk cleanup. Hopefully that will go fine, and then perhaps I will peek at System Restore (the cause of all this trouble) to see if it’s working. I’m not quite mentally ready to do that yet, and I have a lot of work to do this weekend after missing a few days due to the Windows issues. But I’m cautiously optimistic about the prospect.

I have a big list of ’shoulds’ for my business right now. Unfortunately, things are getting in the way: the big problem I’m having with Windows 7 is the main one right now. I’m waiting for Microsoft tech support to call within the next hour for the third troubleshooting session of the week…

Anyway I thought it would help me get moving on some of my business ’shoulds’ if I wrote about it. Here they are, in no particular order.

• Think about my new year’s resolutions for Red Kite Creative, and then write a post about them. I’m thinking, but I haven’t written anything down yet…
• Send out thank-you’s for the referrals I’ve received so far this year (that would be three). I’ve actually acted on this one; I tried to think of something a little out of the ordinary to send as a thank you gift. I love going to the movies, so I bought movie gift cards – enough for a movie and snacks for the client and his/her significant other. And Cinemark lets you upload a custom image to use on your cards – so they’re logo items! They’re in the mail to me at this moment.
• Write and send out the first email newsletter of 2010. Normally I send this out the first week of the month. I’m hoping to get to it this weekend.
• Update my client address book and sync it with my Blackberry’s.
• Send out an email to all current clients offering to update their website’s copyright (if it needs it) and check in to see if I can help them out with anything related to their site or hosting.
• Redesign NOCO Hosting’s business card. I redesigned the website in November and should probably have cards to match.
• Get QuickBooks up to date for 2009. This is probably the most urgent thing, because I need hard numbers to send to the city in a few days. I need to sit down for a few hours this weekend and get all the end-of-the-year payments in (and make sure it all reconciles). I really dislike accounting.

I think that’s enough, although I can probably come up with a few more. These are the most pressing items, however, and I’m hoping to tackle several of them this weekend.

That is, if I don’t have to spend it reinstalling Windows 7 or worse yet, going back to XP.  I really hope it doesn’t come to that.

So where is Microsoft? There’s only 45 minutes left in this two-hour support call window…

Last Friday I discovered that Windows 7 was deleting all my system restore points on every reboot.

Since then I’ll bet I’ve spent 8 hours researching the problem and trying the most commonly reported fixes (this appears to be a surprisingly common problem in Win 7 – there were 43 posts about it on MS’s system protection and recovery forum at last count), and none of them have worked.

Today at 12:30 I found that I did have access to free support, created a ticket and called the number they gave me.

I was on the phone with two tech support people (one in the research department) for 3 hours and 42 minutes. The battery died in one of my phones and I had to switch in the middle.

My problem wasn’t solved – they’re calling me back at 2:00 tomorrow hoping to have a fix for me so I don’t have to do another install, which I definitely don’t have time for. And I don’t want to do a clean install without knowing what caused this, since it seems to be a Windows 7 bug that’s affected a lot of machines.

However, I was very pleased with MS tech support. They were extremely thorough, extremely polite, and although non-native English speakers were for the most part easy to understand.

I’m praying that I get an effective fix tomorrow and don’t have to reinstall, or sit through another 3-hour call. But if I do wind up reinstalling, I can feel confident that everything possible had been tried.

Our gym held its annual Resolution Rampage on Saturday Jan. 2 – the goal is to complete four classes in four hours, and if you do you get points toward the rewards program (I’m focused on getting some free massages).

My husband and I both participated. He did four spin classes and I did three spin classes and one yoga session (it was packed, too – about 50-60 people with mats 12 inches apart made for some comical positioning problems) between 7:15 and 11:30 Saturday morning. Free massage, here I come…

I have a pet project using WordPress that’s close to the final testing stage. I really wanted to have the page that opens when a user wants to edit their profile look like the rest of my site, not like a stripped-down version of the WP dashboard.

I’d been trying to use a combination of  the Customize Your Community plugin, which puts the login, registration, password reminder and profile pages into your theme, but Create Your Community was having a conflict with the custom user meta data display. After a number of attempts to get around that problem, I decided to go ahead and do it the other way – customize the core file responsible for the ‘edit profile’ page, which is /wp-admin/user-edit.php.

Now this work only effects the ‘edit profile’ page, it has no effect on the login/registration/password reminder pages. For that, I found the Theme My Login plugin. Works well, puts those functions right into your theme, and is oretty easy to style with CSS.

So now I’m a happy camper. I wish there’d been a way to easily make the profile page work with my theme, but going this route was not that big of a deal. I simply took the header and footer sections from my theme and replaced the “include(‘admin-header’.php);” and “include(‘admin-footer.php’); statements in /wp-admin/user-edit.php. It took only about 5 minutes to get this looking right, and now I’m just doing a little bit of styling on the form itself.

Of course, whenever WP updates I’ll have to replace the two code snippets in the new user-edit.php file. That’s not a huge deal. But eventually perhaps WordPress will have a feature that enables one to keep all the user accessible pages in the theme rather than on the admin side.

I found a nice tool from TechSpot that will let you search listings of items frequently found in the Startup folder for windows – search or choose alphabetically.

And for services, Black Viper’s enormous list and descriptions will help you cull unnecessary items and reduce the drain on your computer’s memory.