Ay. I haven’t been able to work on any of my side projects or go to the gym this week because things are so incredibly busy! To make matters worse my computer nearly died on me with some very valuable stuff on the desktop that I didn’t have backups of — silly me.

I don’t actually have any virus protection software on my computer because it just slows everything down and I don’t visit sites that I don’t trust anyway. I don’t get viruses. My system’s lasted me about 8 months without any problems until the other day when I was doing some routine clean-ups and set her to start in safe mode to give her a nice flush. When my compy restarted I was greeted with the infamous Blue Screen of Death at every restart and I wanted to cry.

I called Dell thinking they would have some magical solution, but no, after being on hold for over an hour, the tech support from India told me to do a repair install of Windows. Thanks, I knew that.

So I was doing a repair install of Windows and everything seemed hunky dory until Windows setup asked me for a driver cd that I didn’t have. I downloaded the driver on my laptop, burnt the cd, and it was running great until the system restarted in safe mode and I got an error message “cannot run setup in safe mode”. Great. This happened about 5 times in a row before I realized I had to change the boot record. Bah - another 3 hours wasted.

I changed the boot record, setup ran again, and it was great. This time around the drivers for my USB mouse and keyboard didn’t load so I couldn’t respond to any of the prompts in Setup, and I was essentially stuck. Eventually I tricked the computer into loading my mouse drivers.

Two days later Windows was up and running again complete with all of my important files.

I was so relieved I went and checked my sites, and downloaded some stuff just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.

What did I learn from all this? Never take your system for granted! Backup! Backup! Backup!

Oh, by the way. Don’t automatically think that your hard drive is lost if something goes wrong, there are ways of getting yer stuff back!