It finally happened....

It finally happened - got too fancy for my own good, and the only way to fix it was to "Refresh" my Windows 8 from the installation DVD. If you haven't ever done that, let me tell you that you lose all your own third-party stuff, and as Windows gets "refreshed" it only saves Apps from the Windows Store. Everything else, like your treasured 'freebies' that you roamed the world to collect, get deleted, and only their names are saved in a neat little list accessed via an icon on your "new" desktop called 'Removed Apps'.

There's one saving grace here, though. Windows saves all your own personal files, which includes your Downloads folder, so if you've still got the downloaded installation files for all those treasured programs, you can begin the tedious task of going down that list and reinstalling all that delightful stuff, as you grow older
by the minute.

And remember that blurb I did here the other day about making a Recovery Disc? Well, if you've still got your original installation DVD, you don't need that.
The original has all that on it, and you don't need to worry about anything being lost in translation. It's the genuine article itself, from away back when. And now I can spend my spare time for the next couple of days here re-installing the stuff my helpful Windows refresher just deleted. 

I have an obvious suggestion for Mighty Microsoft for the forthcoming Win-9 -
When doing the part about "Refreshing your PC" try harder to make it save all of
the user's programs as well as your Microsoft ones. Maybe Microsoft is God where you are, in case they haven't pruned your branch of the old family tree yet, but around here, my preferences take precedence, and it severely strains my tenuous magnanimity when I lose a list of programs just to fix some code in Wonderful Windows. If I didn't already have it on here, I'd rush right out and get the latest version of PC-BSD, and just put Windows on 'Hold' until Win-9.....

Fortunately, Windows 8 is only one-third of the operating systems on this drive,
and the Windows 7 and the PC-BSD are both fully dressed and fully functional.
And now you know why I've got more than one operating system on here.