Friday, March 20, 2009

C:\ Surgery.exe

Something is rotten in the house that Thief built. My Laptop, my $1 Laptop, has crashed out. It will not boot. It will not load. It does not dream.

I have The Fear.

I know that the hard drive is okay. The system almost boots when I tell it to start in DOS mode. It shows me the drivers it's trying to load from the hard drive and I can hear it spinning. The heart beats still. The processor works. The motherboard is okay. I can load BIOS and it stays working. It does not fail there. XP will not boot though. It just restarts after a quick flash of, "We are shutting down the system to protect your crap."

This weekend, I have to do surgery on my computer. I've taken them apart before. Built them. Destroyed them without thought to their components and their innards. But never a laptop and now, it matters. My work of the last 2 Years is in that system, trapped within it's ill electronic guts. If I fail. If I cannot raise the dead, then I'm screwed. There is no polite way to say it. I do have an archive from a month ago, so all would not be lost. But I do not know how I would continue working.

If I can do it, then my computer will be christened Lazarus. Songs will be sung. Feasts will be had. Triumphs will be paraded.

I've done research and it seems my system has faulty RAM chips. If I pull them out and put them back, they should reset. If that does it, then well, dancing happens. Then, since my Laptop will be in a dozen pieces on my coffee table, I'll install new, bigger RAM. Transfer my data my flash drives and stick in a new hard drive. Then, I shouldn't have to worry about anything like this happening again. I hope that my patient doesn't die on the table.

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