Two items wanted a computer restart re updates: 1) Dell’s maintenance software and 2) one of the updaters both wanted a computer reboot.

Did a warm reboot and the machine came up. In the process, I’d seen some junk in the Explorer files that was everything from recipes to old novel outtakes, and decided to move them to folders and organize them. Spent about 30 min doing a gross sort.

Then I called up my novel. Word Perfect had lost its ‘history’ of what’s been called recently. This is usual on a reboot. Of course. No sweat. I called up Explorer, asked it for the current file…and got an ancient one, mostly outline.

Well, damn. I doublechecked the directory, called up what should be it, and got the outline again.

I then set about to recall key words which might be unique to this novel, and Explorer couldn’t find them. It found a lot of references in stuff from five years back.

I then got into ‘file options’ and found the search criteria not set to find-word-inside-files, which is my preference, but this is a fairly new computer.

No joy.

Well, at this point I am feeling a little frantic, and contemplating consulting Carbonite, but with my file indexing screwed so badly the computer’s lost its document organization, I’m a little hesitant. I start searching file by file, visually, starting with the most logical places it should (still) be.

Found it.

I did find there are ways to force a re-indexing. But I’d already solved my problem. I trust the computer is now doing that without being asked. I’ll doublecheck later.

Jane suspects (and I think she’s right) that the update required a re-indexing which is not yet complete, ergo the confusion, increased when I moved some files…probably started it all over again.

It would be really nice if I could find a search like my old one that would search by date created: I realize that modern programs generate thousands of ‘new’ files, but if you could target a specific directory, you could weed those enormously.

At any rate, I gave the ‘real’ file a unique name and special location.

But it disturbed the whole household when Jane was trying to remember a bit she’d formed, then forgotten; and myself,on a sincere roll, who lost that thread; so Jane’s in there pulling hair algae from our [still in maturing-mode] large marine tank and I’m sitting here writing this post.

Aagh!