Geez, I've had no end of computer troubles lately. I lost my computer for the last three days, again, although this time I'm not exactly sure why...you'll see.
I got home from school on thursday to find my mom blabbing about how the computer wasn't working because "something wasn't plugged in." I heaved a heavy sigh and went to go check it out. I sat down at my computer (that I had used the night before) to find it restarting in a continuous loop before WinXP even loads. Sigh.
So I try, unsuccessfully, to boot, but it just keeps restarting. So I try to boot in safe mode. No dice. I get irritated, double check the BIOS to make sure my bro hasn't screwed with anything, nope. I turn off my computer and open up my case, hoping to find a loose wire or something. Nada. So I rip some more hair out, another part of me dies, and I boot it back up to try the dreaded SYSTEM RESTORE. You know, the one that resides on that idiotic ~5 Gb partition that's been sitting on my HD since the day I bought it, and done nothing but slow up my system and frag itself to hell? Yeah, that one. At least I'd be finally putting it to use. Or so I thought.
D:/ SYSTEM RESTORE CANNOT BE FOUND
oshi
So I bite the bullet and call tech support. The idiot on the phone, after charging me a ballbreaking $40, goes through all the normal procedures for idiots, even though I'd already very clearly explained to her what I'd done. But I went through the motions with her anyway- safe mode, bios, system restore, yadda yadda. Obviously, she doesn't help in the slightest, and concludes that I somehow picked up some MASSIVE VIRUS that corrupted my entire drive to all hell. I doubted this, but decided to give her the benefit of the doubt anyway and went along on this thread for awhile. But, I asked her, how could a virus infect my system if I haven't installed anything, much less run an .exe that was any way out of the ordinary or suspicious, in the past few days? Oh, she says, do you use MSN? No. "Well, MSN can infect your computer with a system killing virus." I told her I'd heard about that, which is why I don't use MSN Messenger nor do I have it installed on my computer (plus the fact that I hate it anyway). It doesn't matter, she tells me, because it can be used as a hacking tool to infect your computer even if you don't use it. It can also infect your computer by visiting infected web sites. I hung up.
So I gave up and handed it to my computer guru friend, who ran a couple of nifty programs and found out the problem in about five seconds. Remember that idiotic, stupid, system killing recovery partition I told you about? The one with all the Windows system files on it? Yeah, for some reason it likes to frag itself to all hell. I'd ran dozens of defrags on it (and my C drive), but it just kept getting more and more fragmented. Huh. Turns out Windows doesn't like it when you defragment system files, and ended up corrupting itself. Fortuantely, my friend ran some programs that restored Windows without destroying too many of my C files, so I retained almost all of my actual data.
Still. Why does this always happen to me?
I got home from school on thursday to find my mom blabbing about how the computer wasn't working because "something wasn't plugged in." I heaved a heavy sigh and went to go check it out. I sat down at my computer (that I had used the night before) to find it restarting in a continuous loop before WinXP even loads. Sigh.
So I try, unsuccessfully, to boot, but it just keeps restarting. So I try to boot in safe mode. No dice. I get irritated, double check the BIOS to make sure my bro hasn't screwed with anything, nope. I turn off my computer and open up my case, hoping to find a loose wire or something. Nada. So I rip some more hair out, another part of me dies, and I boot it back up to try the dreaded SYSTEM RESTORE. You know, the one that resides on that idiotic ~5 Gb partition that's been sitting on my HD since the day I bought it, and done nothing but slow up my system and frag itself to hell? Yeah, that one. At least I'd be finally putting it to use. Or so I thought.
D:/ SYSTEM RESTORE CANNOT BE FOUND
oshi
So I bite the bullet and call tech support. The idiot on the phone, after charging me a ballbreaking $40, goes through all the normal procedures for idiots, even though I'd already very clearly explained to her what I'd done. But I went through the motions with her anyway- safe mode, bios, system restore, yadda yadda. Obviously, she doesn't help in the slightest, and concludes that I somehow picked up some MASSIVE VIRUS that corrupted my entire drive to all hell. I doubted this, but decided to give her the benefit of the doubt anyway and went along on this thread for awhile. But, I asked her, how could a virus infect my system if I haven't installed anything, much less run an .exe that was any way out of the ordinary or suspicious, in the past few days? Oh, she says, do you use MSN? No. "Well, MSN can infect your computer with a system killing virus." I told her I'd heard about that, which is why I don't use MSN Messenger nor do I have it installed on my computer (plus the fact that I hate it anyway). It doesn't matter, she tells me, because it can be used as a hacking tool to infect your computer even if you don't use it. It can also infect your computer by visiting infected web sites. I hung up.
So I gave up and handed it to my computer guru friend, who ran a couple of nifty programs and found out the problem in about five seconds. Remember that idiotic, stupid, system killing recovery partition I told you about? The one with all the Windows system files on it? Yeah, for some reason it likes to frag itself to all hell. I'd ran dozens of defrags on it (and my C drive), but it just kept getting more and more fragmented. Huh. Turns out Windows doesn't like it when you defragment system files, and ended up corrupting itself. Fortuantely, my friend ran some programs that restored Windows without destroying too many of my C files, so I retained almost all of my actual data.
Still. Why does this always happen to me?
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