Ten Little Chances to be Free (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tenlittlebullets) wrote2010-08-12 08:34 pm
tenlittlebullets) wrote2010-08-12 08:34 pm
Oh for the love of--
My computer--the big Windows laptop, not the little Linux netbook that has a thousand annoyances--has never had a major software problem in the five years I've had it. No viruses, no weird pervasive bugs, no catastrophic system errors, no blue screens of death. In recent months it's even tolerated a WinXP/Ubuntu dual-boot with no grumpiness whatsoever. Obviously all this was too good to last. Today I went to boot up the Windows partition for the first time in ages, and it gave me a BSOD at startup. And continued to do so no matter how many times I restarted or told it to boot to the last known good configuration.
Fortunately both safe mode and the Ubuntu partition were working fine, so I got the privilege of spending all fucking afternoon trying to figure out what its problem was. Poking around Microsoft's supremely unhelpful help pages, which claimed there was a fix in Service Pack 3. Downloading SP3 and installing it. Getting a BSOD with a different error code at startup and discovering that SP3 does not play nice with HP computers that have an AMD processor. Uninstalling SP3. Resisting the urge to take a hammer to the computer. Finally getting it to work by using System Restore to go back to some savepoint at the end of July.
I still don't know what the fuck caused it. The two most likely candidates are (1) I started to copy a DVD in Ubuntu and then cancelled it, which may or may not have been responsible for the first BSOD, and (2) I installed a huge pack of Windows updates at the end of July and might not have used the Windows partition between then and now, so if one of the updates had an error I might not have known until now.
At any rate, not the best way to spend an afternoon. The most productive part of the whole damn process was probably the reading I got to do while waiting for potential fixes to download, install, uninstall, etc.
Fortunately both safe mode and the Ubuntu partition were working fine, so I got the privilege of spending all fucking afternoon trying to figure out what its problem was. Poking around Microsoft's supremely unhelpful help pages, which claimed there was a fix in Service Pack 3. Downloading SP3 and installing it. Getting a BSOD with a different error code at startup and discovering that SP3 does not play nice with HP computers that have an AMD processor. Uninstalling SP3. Resisting the urge to take a hammer to the computer. Finally getting it to work by using System Restore to go back to some savepoint at the end of July.
I still don't know what the fuck caused it. The two most likely candidates are (1) I started to copy a DVD in Ubuntu and then cancelled it, which may or may not have been responsible for the first BSOD, and (2) I installed a huge pack of Windows updates at the end of July and might not have used the Windows partition between then and now, so if one of the updates had an error I might not have known until now.
At any rate, not the best way to spend an afternoon. The most productive part of the whole damn process was probably the reading I got to do while waiting for potential fixes to download, install, uninstall, etc.
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I hope you, can get things settled and your computer happy again.
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