The Computer

Murphy’s law is an adage that broadly states: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”

Chalk it up to another one of those things.  Yes, computer crash.  I know it will happen that’s why I back-up frequently. It’s again just one of those timing things.  We are fortunate that our deployment is short.  It’s only four months so one would think that the number of “Murphy’s Law” entries wouldn’t be that long.

I mean yes if we were subject to a 12- month deployment, I can see how lots of things might break or need repairing within a year, but four months?  C’mon.

So it started a few weeks ago, I was playing some dumb game on Facebook when the computer froze.  It happens often (but not often enough for me to stop playing dumb games!).

I tried to close my browser, all I got was that loud chugging sound.  You know the one that indicates the hard drive is working way too hard in there for a simple task like closing a browser.  As I sat there waiting for smoke to come out of the CPU, the screen went blue.

AHHHHHHH! The blue screen of death. The problem is that I hadn’t backed the computer up in about three weeks.

I went into panic mode.  I booted up the laptop and got a “registry” error.  Are you freaking kidding me?  Yes, we bought them both at the same time, on the same day but it cannot be possible that they would both self-destruct at the same exact moment.

I went to work on the laptop figuring it would be easier to fix than the blue screen of death.  It was.  I googled ways to get around the blue screen of death, without much success.

I couldn’t even get the thing to start up in “safe mode.”  So I turned it off, then turned it back on.  I then sat on the couch and started praying.  It didn’t seem to do any immediate good.  So after an hour of blue screen I went to bed.

I kid you not, when I came downstairs the next morning, my computer had re-booted and looked just fine.  The computer fairies came in the middle of the night.

I immediately backed everything up and waited.  It was slow, but still working.  Periodically the hard drive would start making the horrible chugging sounds as it seemed to be eating away at itself.  (at least that’s how it sounded!).  I proceeded to back up new files every day for about 2 weeks.

I gave up on it two days ago and now am still in the process of reloading all the important programs and drivers on the new one.   The silence coming from the new machine will take some getting used to.