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Monday, October 11, 2004


A laptop named Desire 

Oh, the pain and misery of computer ownership! It's just not worth it!!!!

I am, for a short time, labtop-less.

Last week, I tried to connect my computer to the biology server here, so that I would be able to remotely access my files. This was much more involved than either I or our genius computer guy, MD, thought. I had to make a VND network (which sounds dirty, but it's not) and alllll kinds of fun stuff. We eventually got it to work - hooray! Turns out Zonealarm, my firewall of choice, did not like VND networks or new network drives. No siree. We're not going to have any of that happy crap going on. MD thought I might have an easier time of it if I install service pack 2, which will put Microsoft's Firewall on my computer. The horror. I have avoided SP2 like a frothing ebola monkey because I heard that it would do TERRIBLE things to my computer. Like cause iTunes to not work. *shudder*

Michael assured me that nothing terrible would happen, I just needed to run my spyware programs, clean off any bugs, and then uninstall them. I could reinstall them (adaware and spybot) afterwards. He gave me a SP2 disk and wished me luck.

Friday night I took a deep breath, and installed SP2. Amazing...it went off without a hitch! Everything worked! La la la!

I spent saturday cleaning up in anticipation of Movie Night, and taking short breaks for blogging and stuff. After pulling off the couch cover to wash it (umm...not that there was any creepy CSI-type stains on it, or anything) I noticed that my laptop had mysteriously rebooted. Wha?

When I got to my profile, windows wanted to send an error report, because something bad had happened. Sure, whatever. To my surprise, it actually came back with a solution! It was InCD's fault! and all I had to do was download an update for InCD, and all would be right with the world again. La la!

I downloaded the update, ran it, and got a message saying that my InCD was too old to update (WTF? my laptop is less than a year old!). I would have to unintall, reboot, and run the update again, and I would get a brand spanking new InCD! Hooray!

Being a good little computer user, that's exactly what I did. After reinstalling InCD, it wanted me to reboot. Later. I was doing important blogging stuff. I shut it down before my friends got there.

Later that night, Kevin turned on the labtop. Nothing. Zip, nada. Some angry beeping, and error messages that looked something like this:

INCDrev0000000000000X
INCD00000000000000SX

1453.66684

INCD000000000000000.8

what horrible language is that??? Obviously, InCD was not playing well with my computer, or SP2. Kevin tried all sunday to fix it. He thinks he disabled InCD, but it still won't boot up.

Brought it in to work today to have MD look at it. He just came down a little while ago with a verdict.

"are there any important files on your computer that need saving?"

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

STELLLLLLLLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Crap.

So MD will reinstall windows (XP Professional instead of Home. hope THAT doesn't screw anything up) tonight, and I'll get it back tomorrow. And hopefully I'll still have all my digital pictures and original blog template. Ack!

Sigh.

And I'm a big stuffy head today because of allergies. I would have my allergy medication, but that's a WHOLE other post about my stupid student insurance coverage.

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