R.I.P.

My computer died. It's been four days, and yesterday, I finally got my old laptop out of storage just so I could read my mound of backlogged email. To be totally truthful, the computer didn't die. It was accidentally killed... by my stupidity. There are times when I am so exhausted, I should just leave the keyboard and go to bed. But no, instead, I try to fight through the fatigue. After all, I'm so close to the end of the work I've been doing for nearly a year, I can taste it.

The other night, I tried to install a new piece of software (work related). It didn't work the way I had hoped, so I tried to uninstall it. When it uninstalled, it seems to have taken part of a related piece of software with it. So now, not only did the new software not work, but it messed up something else. "No problem", I thought. I have "System Restore" on my system. I confidently went into the System Restore menu, only to find that there were no restore points on that date. So, I backed up into the previous month. On the last day of the month, there was a good restore point, and off I went.

To my horror, in the middle of the process, I noticed that the restore date was October 31st (not March 31st). Yikes!!! So, I do the stupidest thing I can think of... I pull the plug out of my PC. After the reboot, my computer came back to life, but it was really messed up. Nothing seemed to be working right. In fact, the only thing that seemed to work was Windows itself.

I'm very proud of the fact that I do twice-daily automated backups. I checked, and verified that I had a complete system backup that was only hours old. Thank GOD!!! I figured the best thing to do was to restore the registry, since everything on the computer seemed to still be there. I figured the only thing I needed was to put the registry back.

Really bad idea!!!

Despite warnings from my computer and backup program, I forged ahead and restored from my backup. Then I rebooted. I got a blue screen with a "Sytem Protection Fault." message. This was not good. Each reboot was met by the same message. I was finally able to get the system to reboot in SAFE mode, and now I knew that I would have to endure the wait to do a COMPLETE restore on my system. Only one problem... under SAFE mode, my CD-ROM drivers aren't loaded, and my backup was made to CD-ROM discs.

So now, I have to wait until my next trip home to pick up my System Restore CD. Once I apply that, and reinstall my backup software, I'll finally be able to restore from my backup. Until then, I'll have to put my programming on the back burner, and deal with only limited access to my blog and email accounts.