As of last night, Goblin, my desktop at home, has taken a temporary leave of absence. It all started about a month ago when the computer caught a nasty virus. The worst part was watching it happen. It was one of those that installed several others in the process. For the next couple of weeks, I kept cleaning off more and more. Eventually, I got it clean, but it wasn’t the same. Every 2-12 hours, it would get a fatal exception and crash. Apparently, one of the drivers that didn’t want to identify itself had been corrupted. I tried several methods to recover it without reinstalling, but none of them worked. So for another week, I dealt with it rather than take the time to reinstall.
Last night, I finally got fed up enough with it to finally do something about the problem. Satyr, the Media Center computer in the living room had been having issues as well, although they seemed to all be software related. After some minor surgery, all of the memory and storage from Goblin, as well as the video card with dual monitor support, had been moved to Satyr, which had a faster processor. Through the whole process, I felt a little bit like a necromancer during this whole process, so Wraith seemed like an appropriate name. Perhaps I’ve just been playing too much Warmachine.
I learned an important lesson during this process. When using a shop vac to dust out your computer, always do so in a well ventilated area. I’d used it to vacuum out some of the dust, but that wasn’t getting enough of it, so I switched it to blow the dust out. By the end of it, the cloud of dust in my computer room was so thick I could barely see the other wall. I ended up coughing for an hour or two afterward.
Next, it needed an operating system. I’ve been enjoying running Vista RC1 at work, so I thought I would install RC2 at home. Unfortunately, there’d been a problem with the disk I’d burned of it and it wouldn’t install. So I thought, I’ll install Fedora Core 6, which I’d been wanting to try out anyway. If I’d have thought about it, I would have realized that might be a bad idea. Both of the disks had been burned the same day, on the same computer. It didn’t work either. And to make it worse, my good copy of XP was sitting on my desk at work.
After sitting there frustrated for about 20 minutes, I remembered having another copy of Vista RC2 that I thought had been bad. I figured at this point, it wouldn’t hurt to try it. Luckily, it installed just fine. After three hours of bullshit, I finally had a working computer again.
