Devon Ellington Day

Image: Top Banana

I hope Devon doesn’t mind me naming today in her honour, but after the Sunday I’ve had I couldn’t think of anything more appropriate. When I went to bed last night everything was fine in computer land, but when I woke up this morning, a technical apocalypse had ensued.

Over the last week or so my PC had been taking longer to boot up in the morning, once or twice hanging in the process and requiring a power off. It was nothing that worried me, because as I continued to take regular backups, and with the computer functioning as it should when it was running, it allowed me top investigate the cause.

I had tracked the problem down to a corrupt system file in the Windows root directory, and as I shut down last night I decided I would run the Windows repair function in the morning to rectify it. Only, when I tried to logon, I couldn’t. The boot up was failing after the memory check citing the system error, and not even in Safe Mode or Previous Successful Logon Attempt could I get it to run.

It was a full hour and a half before I could get past this and into the system. My backups were all up to date so I set about reinstalling Vista from scratch, and then re-installing all my software back onto the PC.

One little file, one tiny, unreadable, unheard of file, and my entire system fell to its knees.

On the bright side it gave me a chance to do a clear out. Over time, I tend to collect a lot of garbage and trial software I might want to use in the world of website development or e-book design, and this failure meant I could clear out all that stuff.

It was much later by the time I had rebuilt my PC, and had only to remove all the duff files from the previous installation to clear up space and tidy everything up by the time I stopped to take delivery of the Dominos pizzas I had ordered for dinner.

Good things on for this week include the meeting of several large’ish deadlines in my GDR, an evening out with 5333 Squadron on Wednesday, a night over at my sister’s in Glasgow on Friday, and a trip to The National Stadium to watch St. Mirren play Rangers in the semi final of the Scottish Cup on Saturday.

Oh, and why Devon Ellington Day in particular? Because she has to be the unluckiest PC-owner I know. Any technical problems that could go wrong with her PC and software, has at some point occurred. And for a writer, or any person heavily reliant on their computer for a living, it’s not good news. At one point yesterday I even considered getting a Mac…

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