Why Hasn't Art Been Blogging?

Maybe you have wondered, or maybe not, why my blog has been so poorly updated recently. There are a number of reasons - competing demands for time, the natural post-TNT event letdown - but the biggest reason has been my computer, which has essentially gone on strike.

The computer is old, coming up on six years old. In fact, I need to enroll it in First Grade soon. And as time has gone on, it gets slower and slower. But for some reason, it has gone from very slow to glacial in the last few weeks. This week in particular has been terrible. The other day, it took an hour to open one page document in Word, make a half dozen minor changes, open Outlook, write a two sentence note, attach the document and a couple of photos, and send it. As I typed this prior sentence, everything froze up for about five minutes or so mid-sentence, and I just had to wait to continue.

I have done everything I can think of. I defragmented the disk, checked virtual memory, freed up disk space from 2% to 15%, run Spybot, and last night I downloaded and ran Malwarebyte free anti-malware software, which found and corrected about 10 problems that Norton overlooked. Whoops, just did it again - locked up for about 5-6 minutes. I've also knocked a couple of things out of the startup menu, and checked the swap space, because the disk activity light stays on almost all the time. Then only thing I have not done is taken a sledge hammer to the laptop, and that has been tempting.

I am kind of at the end of ideas, but hope to figure it out and get back to blogging soon. By the way, opening Internet Explorer, logging into Blogger, and writing this short post took me about a half hour.