Annoying Last Couple of Days

     The last few days have been annoying! To begin with we have been suffering through a polar vortex which has brought unusually cold weather with temperatures below zero...normal for some regions, but not us. 
     And, after making my post of January 28th I booted up my laptop only to get a blue screen. Searching the internet on another laptop hinted that the cause might be hard drive failure! There was no choice but to go out into the cold and lug the laptop over to Best Buy where the tech confirmed the problem. It cost $272 to replace the drive with a solid state drive which is nice and very fast, reinstall Windows and the antivirus. 
     After getting the laptop back, it took a whole day downloading and re-installing all the programs on the new drive. My beloved Fritz 12 was gone and I could not find the CD with the program on it anywhere. However, I was able to download and get Aquarium 12 functioning although it's not my favorite. I tried both Arena and Scid v PC and while they are good programs with lots of features, I'll relearn how to use Aquarium. Edit: After a day of copy/pasting files off the old drive and a lot of tinkering Fritz 12 is now working.
     Fortunately, I was able to mount the old hard drive in an old IOCell i-Portable external drive and salvage all my documents and photos. That's good because Best Buy wanted $150 to do it! I would recommend purchasing one of these devices if you can find one, or at least something similar! If a laptop crashes all you have to do is plug the hard drive into the IOCell i-Portable case and you can access all your documents. 
     I also noticed that for some reason games posted with Knight Vision only appear in mobile viewer mode. Why, I don't know. The problem is that notes don't appear in the games. I guess it really doesn't matter though because Knight Vision has posted a memo that Adobe Flash Player will no longer be supported at the end of 2020 and are encouraging content creators to migrate any existing Flash content. The Knight Vision viewer uses Adobe Flash and will stop working when Flash stops working! Apparently that means that next year the games in this blog disappear. Boo on Adode!  Edit: I posted a viewer that worked very well for a day or so, but then it ceased working. It appears that one needs a paid account at Chessbase for the program to function properly.