BSOD

January 6 , 2008

For the past three weeks I've been living in computer hell.

Absolute, complete, abject computer hell.

Main computer broke the week before finals and I went to a Big Box store and bought a "quick" replacement.

Enter VISTA

It's no wonder that it won an award for being among the top 10 technological disasters of 2007.

It's worse than walking through wet dog shit and then tracking it onto your white carpet.

I took the first computer back after a week.

I almost took the second computer back after two weeks more, but decided that the challenge of fixing it would be more satisfying than paying a "restocking fee."

I got it to work, after untold hours of meandering through Microsoft Tech support documents.

Vista sucks.

It wouldn't work with my printer, it won't talk to my other computers and it won't connect to the internet with my router. Beware before you "upgrade," unless you have no other choice.

Meanwhile, since I had an "issue" with my laptop just before I took my final exam of law school, I decided to reformat the hard drive and reinstall windows XP on it. The issue was serious enough that I felt compelled to bring in the stand-by IT guy who is always there at finals time to try and solve "issues" with the exam software. Although I finally had no problem taking the exam, my 15 minute "boot-up" time had me concerned.

So now, my nice and cleanly restored faithful laptop has decided that it prefers BSOD over reliability.

No, it's not gone into some kind of sexual perversion. In tech talk, it's called the Blue Screen Of Death, and it's what shows up when the computer throws up it's hands and gives you the finger.

I got the BSOD so many times last week that on Thursday evening I decided to reinstall windows all over again - including connecting to the web and getting 4,598,334,228 downloads to bring it up to date.

Finally on Friday afternoon I decided that there was no way I could take that laptop into the biggest exam of my life, and have it give me the finger.

I probably should not have bought another dell, but this one did give me 4 years of flawless performance, and the price of the new one is about 800 bucks less than I spent on the last one.

I really couldn't afford it at this exact moment in time, but I suppose that's what credit cards are for after all.

Meanwhile, MRS wants a laptop for occasional use and as we speak, I'm going for round 3 of reinstalling windows. Soon, I hope, I can get out of this place and back to studying full time.