Son of a Whore ...
 

So, I have this doorstop.

Until this morning (efffin' Friday the 13th), it was a Dell Inspiron 1501 (Vista) Laptop. Of course I didn't back it up. Who backs things up anymore?

Anyway, when I went to turn it on this morning, it informed me that it was installing updates ... updates which, incidentally, it didn't tell me about when I shut it down last night.

I do not know WTF happened. What I do know is that tonight I'm staring at the "Feeble Attempt to Self-Recover" screen.

The little blue bar continues to move from left to right, so I have at least the illusion that it's trying to do something to right itself.

eff eff effin eff.

The thing gets totally used for play rather than work, it's not like I left a three-quarters finished novel sitting on the drive, and I'm pretty sure than any photos that I actually care about are sitting waiting for me on flickr, so my beloved Disney Memories are safe as long as I remember to pay for the extra storage.

And no, of course I don't know where the restore disc got off to. I packed it for the move a couple years ago and have no idea which box it ended up in.

Buy a new computer, set it up, and in front of its webcam, shoot the old one.

I've been reading ads for the iPad, in hopes of intimidating the laptop into getting it's shit together.

After a couple of hours of nailbiting and thumbtwiddling, the system repair announced it's inability to do anything.

Interestingly, however, it then offered me the option of choosing a system restore point.

Why the fuck didn't it do that first, I wonder.

Back to thumb twiddling.

Oh. That seems not to have worked either.

Might as well try to get some sleep. Maybe if I ignore it it will just heal itself.

And to top it all off, I was just menaced by a massive spider, which I bravely escorted outside, and it came back in. So I escorted it outside further.

I warned it. No more miss nice wolf. Next time I go for the can of Raid.

And, as this seems to be a night for doing things over, the laptop offered me that system repair option again when it failed to boot. So I'm leaving it to it's own devices, at least until morning.

Nothing.

Doorstop condition remains in place.

Will probably hand off to a cow orker who does computers on the side, while trying to remember if there is any damn thing that I actually need on the hard drive. I pretty much have CDs for all of the MP3s, no major documents, just backups of the Crackberry, photographs, don't remember anything else offhand, not sure if I'll try to restore from the very old backup I have, not even sure I can do this, since it's on an external USB drive rather than a CD.

Crap.

I sometimes do computer repairs for friends and neighbours. I hope you don't left anything naughty on the drive like one of them.

He had told me that he wanted to get his holidays pictures back. Being a good guy, I attempted to get everything looking like a document back on line (jpg, gif, wmv, avi, doc, xls ...). I was treated with something like 15 gigabytes of him and his girlfriend doing the naughty either in pics or vids. And a mere 20 megabites of holidays pictures.

All in all, a very good laugh

But you did take the time to verify that all the pics and videos were of him and his girlfriend...

...I'll send you an upload link for the copies you made

It was funny to watch for a bit but I did not kept any file as I wished to keep the friendship.

Maybe a USB thumb drive by post?

Nope

lolling