The System Is Down!

This post has nothing of relevance to anyone but me. But just in case my three or so readers are wondering where the hell I've been:

Back on Friday, I was just getting home from the bar and I was going to blog on how I almost hit a herd of stupid deer (there was at least six doe, just milling around in the middle of the freaking road!). I came in, sat down at my desk, and flipped on my computer. Then this popped up on the screen:

"Windows cannot start because the following file is missing or corrupted: C:\Windows\System32\Config\System"

Oh beautiful. The system file is broke. There's some major anal pillaging, right there. So Automated System Recovery requires floppy disks (whoops! I no longer have a floppy drive! Haven't needed one since the invention of thumb drives with several hundred times the capacity of floppies, you know...), so I can't use that. The windows recovery console? It's just an emasculated version of DOS. Seriously, utterly useless in my current predicament.

Reinstalling. Oh, there's some good news. Fortunately, I had a spare hard drive lying around. Installed Windows on that drive, and I still have all my files on my old drive intact. Fresh clean install, connect to the Internet... Ten minutes, I was hit with spyware. I hate those people.

I was hit that fast because I was using the original release of XP Pro. No security updates, and there was some pretty big holes in the first release. Thankfully, I have an Microsoft Developer's Network subscription. Mmm. New releases. Slap SP2 on here, and I'm good to go. Not fond of SP2 due to some of it's changes, but it's far better than getting bombarded by people using the security holes to send me "CLICK HERE NOW!!!!1!" popups.

Operating system is reinstalled, security patches in place, Antivirus and Antispyware all back on and updated. (Oh yeah, and I patched Ultima Online back up too. Must have games...) Had to lug my tower over to a friend's house to hook up to his DSL connection to get all the stuff (Dial-up just won't work for that sort of thing anymore, too many megs per download), but I'm finally back up and running. My harddrives are running pretty hot for some reason, though. Need a casefan. Other than that, smooth sailing.

But I'm still fairly mad. I shouldn't of had to waste all my time reinstalling everything. Random file corruptions shouldn't happen. Am I really that far out of line to ask things to work reliably? I think not.

They just need someone like me in Microsoft QC. I'm show them what's what. :)

Oh well. Rock on, kids.