And once again we return to the continuing saga of Elisabeth's laptop...

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1) A few weeks ago, I started having problems regarding a loose wire in my AC adapter. (Details here and here) My laptop would generally run off AC power (though sometimes the cord needed a little jiggling) but it wouldn't recharge.

Well, I've since replaced the cord, and my system boots up fine.

Unfortunately, during that week I drained my batteries to ~93% and they don't seem to want to recharge.

Did the bad cord do permanent damage to my laptop batteries?

I'm tempted to let them drain a little further and see whether they'll recharge back up to 100% or only as far as 93%.

The only reason I haven't done this yet is that I'm worried that it may not recharge at all...

Suggestions?

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2) I still cannot access Firedoglake.com and Crooksandliars.com from Opera on my home machine. I can reach those pages from Firefox on my home machine, and from Opera at work (just as a test), but for some reason ever since they were hit by the DDOS attack, I just get errors when trying to open them.

Both sites share the same IP address (38.98.18.100). When I try accessing that from Opera, the page loads but without any of the images (which all have absolute references to ZiaSpace.com, which I gives the same error as the other domains I've mentioned if I try to load it directly).

Last summer I had a similar problem with a different domain, but that one's working now and I don't recall how I fixed it.

Any ideas?

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3) I'm also still experiencing the system slowdown and Opera problems I described last week.

For comparison's sake, here's the task manager screencap from my last week's post.

As several people suggested, I've disabled Microsoft's Content Indexing Service, but the issue is still ongoing.

I can't remember precisely when I started having these problems, but I've charted up a comparison of differences in installed programs (according to Belarc) between a date I'm pretty sure everything was working to a date after the slowdown began.

January 05	January 19
–	Anonymous - FairUse4WM Module Version 1, 0, 3, 0
avast! Antivirus Version 5, 0, 0, 0	–
–	AVIToolbox Version 1.0.0.0
–	BinarySense, Ltd. - HDDlife Version 2, 9, 0, 109
–	Crave Worldwide,India. - DiskAnalyzer Professional Version 1.8.0.0
–	Dextronet - CubeDrift Version 3.03.0117
–	E-Book Version 1.0.0.0
–	eBookMaestro.com - eBook Maestro Version 1.0.0.0
–	ExtraLabs Software - Feed Mix Version 4.07.0298
–	Geert van Horrik Software - Updater Version 0.8.1.2
–	Google Video Player Version 1, 0, 3, 3
–	Hive Version 1, 0, 0, 1
–	Image Comparer
Inno Setup Version 51.42.0.0	Inno Setup Version 51.44.0.0
–	JigSwap
–	Jordan Russell - Inno Setup Uninstaller Version 51.6.0.0
–	Kontiki Inc. - Delivery Manager Version 4.22.60714.0
–	LopeSoft - FileMenu Tools Version 5.0
–	Microsoft Corporation - Office Source Engine Version 11.0.5525
–	Microsoft Corporation - XML Notepad Version 2.1.0.0
Microsoft Office 2003 Version 11.0.5703	Microsoft Office 2003 Version 11.0.8117
Microsoft(R) Windows Media Player Version 9.00.00.3250	Microsoft(R) Windows Media Player Version 10.00.00.3802
–	Pacmania 3
–	Power Labs - DoubleSafety Version 3.6
–	RealNetworks, Inc. - RealPlayer (32-bit) Version 6.0.12.1741
–	RealNetworks, Inc. - RealPlayer (32-bit) Version 7.0.0.3105
–	Romeo Burner Version 1.0.0.67
–	Tenmiles Corporation - ScreenSwift Version 4.1

Many of these are utilities (or games) from GiveawayOfTheDay.com.
And if it weren't for GOTD's one-day-only install functionality, I'd be tempted to format my drive and reinstall all over again, but I don't want to lose some of these utilities...

I also installed several Microsoft Hotfixes during this period:

Windows XP:   • KB929969 Windows Media Player 10:   • KB917734_WMP10

Office Excel Viewer 2003:   • KB919029   • KB923272   • KB925525

Oh, and one other event comes to mind: Windows Media Player... Between the two dates above, Microsoft started downloading WiMPv11 and I used System Restore to undo it. Maybe that messed something up?

Any further ideas would be most welcome, both specific suspects and techniques to see what's going on with my system.

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And thanks for your patience. These probably haven't been the most entertaining of entries, but writing them out in this manner also helps *me* organize my thoughts and keep track of things.