I’d heard of it, but I’d never actually seen it.  And there it was.  The dreaded Blue Screen of Death (definitely not to be confused with the Dread Pirate Roberts).  Blue it was with nasty messages with words like “stop error screen” and “physical dump of memory.”

There I sat in the middle of a training (as part of those leading the training not those being trained).  In the midst of uploading pictures to a web album, trying to find out what was going on with people all over the world via facebook, and answering emails from a few different addresses my screen would freeze.  My cursor would disappear.  The screen would turn blue.  After the third blue screen I decided to call it quits for the day.

Because I believe that all things mechanical should last forever, I lugged the laptop home.  I turned it on, and it worked!  It worked well until I opened my office email.  Suddenly the freeze began and quickly turned the screen blue.  The logical conclusion?  My computer is allergic to work.

I lugged the laptop back to the office, handed it over to the IT guy who deals with obstinate computers, and did non-computer related work.  The next day the frozen blue computer was declared, “Very bad.”  (I had a feeling.)  By Thursday afternoon the hard drive was declared “very, very, very bad” and probably beyond hope.  I then received a loaner while mine is in the IT’s ICU.

The good news is I backed up everything early in the fall.  The bad news is I have to figure out how to get things off the external hard drive.  The good news is I have a loaner so I’m back on line and blogging.  The bad news is I have a lot of catching up to do.  The good news is I get to grumble at a loaner while I learn Windows 7.  The bad news is I’ve lost all of my bookmarks.  That’s really unhappy.  I don’t think there’s a good news to balance that one.

What happened with you last week?

photo courtesy of Taberandrew