I can be excited about my website again, because it works again. You may not have noticed at your end, but at my end I have been very, very restricted in use of my own website, behind the scenes and even the front end you’re looking at now. I have spent about two months tinkering with bits and pieces on my laptop and netbook but nothing worked. Other sites and functions were fine, but not frou-frou. Only after about 20 minutes did anything eventually load so trying to write posts and upload pictures over that sort of timescale just wasn’t going to work.
Various friends were consulted and advice given, tried, tested and ruled out. There was only one thing for it – practical hands on technical support! And there was only one person for that job – Warren!

After lots of tea, a few cakes (well, it was hard work) and three hours, I present you with a fully working and fully restored frou-frou service. And to go with it a re-invigorated blogging me!
‘What’s been the problem?’ I hear you ask! (OK you may not be but I’m going to tell you anyway. Actually, I’m not going to tell you – these are Warren’s words below!)
‘Here’s pretty much a summary of what I did to fix it. I think the firewall and winsock ones were the most likely to sort it, but here goes from the top:
Go to a Command Prompt (start / run / cmd) and then type:
* netsh winsock reset
* netsh interface ip reset
* netsh routingip reset
* netsh firewall reset
Once all done, restart the PC and then check the site access. I also enabled routing and remote access in Services (services.msc) but possibly that wasn’t necessary to do.’
It seems that this may be caused by an Orange mobile broadband dongle install that somehow corrupted the winsock interface or the firewall settings. When we then turned the Windows firewall off, as the settings were persisting and stopping certain items from downloading quickly, it seemed to be cured!
The most annoying thing in it all was that the site that it had the most impact on was the one I own and run. I probably wouldn’t have been so wound up by it if any another site affected!
So now you can look forward to all the posts that I’ve had in draft in various forms awaiting pictures, editing and publishing. I shall try not to splurge all at once, got a craft fair this weekend to get ready if nothing else.
Oh, and see those green crochet coasters in the pic above… watch this space!
Until the next time, which I am already looking forward to, ta-ra!