It’s been one hell of a week.

My computer has decided that now would be a great time to die, with only a few weeks to go before my final university deadlines. Error message after error message came thundering onto the screen faster than I could tell the computer “Ok”, as though my acknowledgement of the situation would make the slightest bit of difference. After failing to run a system restore, I decided to reinstall Windows. I was 100% confident that this would fix all of my problems in one fell swoop. If only…

Practice safe surfing

My first mistake was trying to reinstall Windows XP Professional instead of Home edition, putting two different installations of Windows on the same machine and solving nothing. Stupid mistake, but I had to move on – there’d be time to deal with a rogue Windows installation when everything else was back up and running. Time to reinstall XP Home Edition! Easy enough, should you have a working XP Home Edition CD at your disposal. Unfortunately, mine was scratched in such a manner than each time I tried to reinstall it, random, but different, files refused to copy across on each of the several occasions I attempted it. Some time later, I bit the bullet and made the always painful decision to format the bastard. But first, I needed to back up all my shit, including Coffeesh0p code and plenty of stuff for this blog, which is no easy task if you can’t boot up your computer in the first place. Luckily, I decided against smashing that XP Professional CD into the wall earlier and cutting myself with the shards, so I thought I’d try and install that again. 39 minutes later, my computer was back up from its death bed, but still not fit for duty. Before I could operate format, I needed to get all my stuff backed up onto another PC on the network, but then the next hurdle cropped up – apparently, I wasn’t authorised to access the files on my own pissing computer! Just in case any of you encounter a situation as shitty as this, you have to log onto your other Windows installation in safe mode, log into the administrator account and set yourself as the owner of the files in question, which is far from a simple task.

Eventually, everything was rescued and the computer formatted, but it’s still not working properly. I suspect it may have some virus or other, but I’ll have to live with it until my exams are over.

As a result, my customer service went down the pan, so I apologise to anyone that sent me an email last week.

In other news, you’ve all been very kind with the new rating system I installed. So far, there’s 14 ratings, only two of which are not five stars. Thanks! Hopefully, I’ll be able to post a bit more once this damn project is over…