Hissy Fit

Tess, my desktop computer, decided to throw a complete hissy fit yesterday. She’d been PMSing for the past several weeks, giving me random BSODs and refusing to boot into Windows properly post-catastrophe.

Yesterday after one of these episodes she outright refused to turn on, prompting me to go on a mad scramble to purchase a new power supply (this makes the third power supply I have had to buy for her since her birthday in August 2005). I always buy my PSUs from Antec because of their 3-year warranty, so with any luck they will be sending me a replacement. The emergency one I purchased is supposed to be more efficient and “earth-friendly” but it’s not modular, which means there are a whole lot of extra cables cluttering up the case (imagine if your body had blood vessels that it couldn’t use just kind of sitting around in your chest cavity and thighs…that’s what it’s like).

While the new PSU allowed Tess to finally wake up, the problems didn’t end. The degeneration leading up to this whole incident corrupted significant parts of her memory, highlighting one of the major weaknesses of the Windows operating system—the whole thing is dependent on a few configuration files to start properly, a system that creates a very vulnerable Achilles’ Heel. It took a lot of jockeying on my part to find some alternate configuration files and copy them to the right places, which enabled her to finally boot into Windows but left her with serious amnesia. Many programs, like Office, are installed but not listed in the replacement configuration file, so as far as she’s concerned they’re not there.

At this point I’m going to have to just back up everything that isn’t already stored elsewhere and wipe the whole thing. It’s too much of a pain to try and figure out everything that’s wrong with the registry and fix it—I’m better off starting with a clean slate.

And I thought I was going to have an easy weekend…