Sunday, April 10, 2011

BSD, or, WTF happened to the laptop???

I have been suffering from the dreaded Black Screen of Death.

It is definitely one of those things that sends a chill of fear down the spine. The white cursor arrow adrift in a sea of dark grey, like a lost glow in the never-ending night. Fear for all the work I've done this week. Gah!

I did a back up two days before the gloom arrived, and had an automatic download the morning of the big black - and that's what caused it. The f*&£$9 download.

The worst of it is wondering if you'll ever get Vista back, the thinking of the work lost, the inability to go online... and spending hours patiently watching the computer operating system search for the key to unlocking the madness.

Okay. I didn't watch, just set the system running and went off to visit with family - but it did take hours.

Finally, after, hmm, six hours or so? I came back and there was Vista, sitting innocently on the screen as if it hadn't caused me twenty-four hours of angst. The first thing I did was back up everything again, then run Spybot S&D as an administrator, then the anti-virus software and finally, searched on-line for a solution should it happen again.

All I can hope is, when I shut down, everything will boot cleanly tomorrow. At least all my important files are copied to an elsewhere should the worst happen.

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