They are made of fail and AIDS. I swear, anything that steals my Sunday and keeps me more or less constantly annoyed does not have the right to exist, and yet I can’t destroy it, because this thing belongs to my sister. I could ofcourse tell her that it spontaneously combusted, but she might find that hard to believe, I don’t know.
So it all started as soon as I got up this morning. I get up at around half an hour past ten, I scrub the sleep out of my eyes, go upstairs, look upon the selection of breakfasts with displeasure, head back downstairs, and I ask my sister if she feels like tacos. “Nah, I’m leaving in 20 minutes. Hey my computer doesn’t work anymore, I turned it off last night, and it won’t turn on today. I got into recovery mode. Here fix it lol brb”
Well, that last part might not have been there, but otherwise it’s an accurate depiction of what happened. Me having been awake for a whole ten minutes or so stand unable to react to the flood of information. You got into recovery mode? Well what did you do??? Nothing, no ofcourse you didn’t, except you did, you just don’t know what you did, so you just shrug and leave me with the mess, isn’t that right?
So I try to save Windows first. It takes me all of 30 minutes or so to realize that this is hopeless. I can’t even get to the bloody login screen, and there’s no way to get into safety mode, because of this new vista implementation thing (recovery my ass). So I get out my Ubuntu live cd, thinking that as usual this will solve everything. But the bloody thing still doesn’t even make it to the login screen before it freezes! I might have cried a little, as I saw my sunday disappear like the morning dews before the rays of the sun.
So I whip out my Debian recovery cd, remembering that there was a problem with my friend’s Ubuntu too, and that he had the same computer. Because of this I make the erroneous assumption that it’s her wifi-card that’s gone bonkers, which probably wasted another hour or so. I try getting into a gparted live cd so I can set up an entirely new system, but gparted won’t let me do squat because the NTFS partition wasn’t unmounted properly. I’m getting really FRUSTERATED by this point, and YES it’s FRIGGIN spelled like that! Do you have a problem with it??
So I dig down to the bottom of my nerdpile, and locate my last shred of hope. Puppy Linux. To my intense glee, it boots perfectly! Little did I know that this was the worst thing that could happen, and was a stroke of incredible misfortune. It boots, so I assume that the hardware is working almost perfectly. Puppy doesn’t load any wifi drivers, so my theories are further strengthened. Now Puppy won’t touch the partition either, but it does let me mount it, and steal the files, butchering my own external harddrive in the process, just in case we have to send it off to be repaired. And then it freezes, and I’m like wtf?? But it’s chill, I probably just left it to its own devices for too long.
So I reboot, mount, unmount, reboot, and windows gets into recovery mode. By this time I have absolutely no idea why anything is working, but it does, so I don’t really care. Until it freezes ofcourse… Reboot, hey! Safety mode? Yes please! I don’t even make it to the login screen, it freezes whilst loading drivers. I’m about to start doing backflips over here. In desperation I try to just boot it normally while crossing my fingers and beating my head against the wall… And it works. I even get to log in as a guest… I try to get online, I have got to get a ccleaner! But I don’t even make it into the browser.
Puppy goes back in the cd-rom tray, mount, unmount, ubuntu goes in, I get into the system, gparted won’t do squat, and then a kernel panic. Puppy goes in again, but this time it doesn’t boot! Eureka, there’s an error while copying to RAM. Is the error reproducible? No, but it does occur randomly. Gentlemen, we are on to something, but it will be another hour until I actually whip out my screwdriverset and do something about it. If that damned microsoft memory-test had been any good at all, I would have had my Sunday, but no, of course not, we can’t trust those bastards to do anything right. After removing the first RAM chip, everything is coming up roses. You would think that I’d at least have to go through both of the chips before actually fixing anything, considering the incredible amount of bad luck I’ve been having today, but I guess once you’ve figured out what’s wrong, the gods of tech stop being assholes, it’s not funny anymore when it’s just postponing the inevitable.
So I’m actually sort of disappointed when the microsoft “recovery” thing claims to fix everything, and windows claims that it’s working like a charm despite having its memory chopped in half. I’m just itching to drive out Vista with holy water, just so I can get some peace of mind, I hate having that thing in the place that I call home.
I won’t write anything this geeky in a while, I promise, but had to vent. I’m sure some of you understand. Also, I know I’ve used this song before, but come on, I’ve got nothing else for this.
Song of the Blog: Hail to the Geek
Sincerely
Bjørn
