What Would You Like Windows To Do Today? F*cking Work!!

Where have I been? There were a couple of blogs for the iPhone crowd and then nothing. The whole jailbreak scene is very interesting if your in to that sort of thing but where did the blog go?

Anyone who followed my stopping smoking attempts from the early days will remember that I got a bit upset about a couple of computer hiccups. I spent a fair bit of February working away on my laptop whilst I used a variety of software to first fix my desktop PC and second try and recover at least some of a dodgy hard drive that had just crumbled. In the process my desk became a clutter of cables between the laptop and the desk top and the hard drive and it wasn't long before I ended up spilling a whole can of beer into the keyboard and killing it too. I was gutted.

Like many of these mini tragedies that we face it did have a kind of perverse upside. There was the triumph of getting the desktop working at all. The pot luck that was recovering the defective hard drive whilst knowing that it was possibly a waste of time, certainly an inconvenience and also potentially lethal to my now semi repaired PC. In terms of success though it was pretty good. Almost everything got recovered and the PC worked once more. What's more it was made all the better that my home built, home spec PC at over five years old was still able to hold its own against most of what's on the market now. In PC terms that's pretty amazing. I'll grant you that when I designed it it would have held it's own against high end gaming PCs where as now it was more like a run of the mill high store model but I was still pretty proud of it. Many of you guys already have me down as a geek and I wouldn't argue except that, I'm 41, didn't do PCs at school (even calculators were a bit of a no no) and have pretty much self taught or used the internet as the font of all knowledge. Fixing things and getting them working properly is still therefor quite an achievement to me.

Where is this going? Well...... One of the main uses for my PC is watching TV. I love being able to watch what I want at a time that suits me and, here in the UK, you can pretty much get all TV via the internet. It fascinates me that this works in most countries however you can only access most of the content if you are doing so using an IP address within that country. Some of you people from the US and Australia would probably love some of the stuff that we get and I'd love to get HBO etc but they have that restricted at the moment (you can get round it but then you need to know what your looking for and what shows are what etc. I can wait).

Anyway we're sitting watching a show on Tuesday night when..the picture freezes. The sound continues but the picture has frozen. Control, Alt, Delete? Pain in the arse but I've noticed more than once recently that control, alt, delete has a habit of bringing up the task list but being just as frozen as the system you're trying to close. Screw it. Hold in the power button and force the stupid thing to restart. Press restart, disc spinning noises, flashing light on the front, noise as Drives are tested, Lock keys on keyboard light up, silence.......disc spinning noises, flashing light on the front, noise as Drives are tested, Lock keys on keyboard light up, silence.......disc spinning noises, flashing light on the front, noise as Drives are tested, Lock keys on keyboard light up, silence.......disc spinning noises, flashing light on the front, noise as Drives are tested, Lock keys on keyboard light up, silence.......disc spinning noises, flashing light on the front, noise as Drives are tested, Lock keys on keyboard light up, silence.......

Finally after about fifteen attempts at the above windows logs in...'error finding a file in the registry but have restored from a copy', 'Error with Java script', active desktop needs to close, AVG process could not start. one of your....Blue Screen Of Death. Disc spinning noises, flashing light on the front, noise as Drives are tested, Lock keys on keyboard light up, silence.......

Few trys later without even getting as far as windows then 'Scandisc needs to check drive C for errors, press any key..' Scandisc is deleting lots of your good stuff and it ain't telling you what it is or why it's deleting it or giving you an option to stop. Blue screen....shutdown. At least scandisc stopped. Disc spinning noises, flashing light on the front, noise as Drives are tested, Lock keys on keyboard light up, silence.......

Few more failed log in attempts but wait...I'm getting in to safe mode. It looks awful. There are still quite a few errors but it's stable enough that I can get restore point to run. Finally there's a chance. Or maybe not. Thousand errors and then blue screen. Disc spinning noises, flashing light on the front, noise as Drives are tested, Lock keys on keyboard light up, silence.......

Yip. The laptop rides again. Hence the blog got put off a bit. Sorry to those who like a weekly dose of Glasgow life but don't have iPhones. I will be trying to resume normal service as soon as possible. For those that do have iPhones: No Jailbreak yet but until my PC is back up I can't get my itunes so I couldn't test a jailbreak anyway.

The plan for recovery borders on crazy and shows a true lack of thought. I still have that dodgy hard drive from the breakdown in January and it's clear. I had a half idea of trying to do some deep rooted recovery to see if there were any last remnants of the drive that could be recovered so had purposefully never written any data to it. I plan to put a clean(ish) install of windows on the dodgy drive and use it to boot the PC. If that works I should then be able to copy all my good files from my normal PC hard drive. Then I should be able to format my normal PC hard drive, re-install stuff and see if it will start running again.

Sounds like a possible plan although it's easy to see failure points at almost every step of the way. Even if it does work, recovering properly and getting stuff back up to date will take a while. You never really get it back the way it was. By the time I go to work on Monday my eyes will be those of zombie and my skin will have the pallor of a man who has lived on coffee for 48 hours and has not left the house. Wish me luck

TQ