The blue screen of death

Friday morning I woke up, worked out, wrote my previous blog post on my laptop, and then proceeded to log onto my desktop to start working. Alas, it was not meant to be. I leave my PC on overnight to perform nightly backups, but I keep the monitor off to save energy. When I turned on my monitor Friday, I was greeted by my old friend, the Blue Screen of Death (or BSoD as the write of the Wikipedia article has deemed it).

See, back in college we were required to purchase top of the line laptops from IBM. The only problem with these "top of the line" laptops was that they were really next years models and we were their beta-testing guinea pigs (it must be nice to get someone to pay you $2,500 to test your products). Back then, I made what felt like weekly trips to the campus computer center - half of which to fix hardware problems (major ones like hard drive failure and the monitor not working) and the other half were to reinstall XP after receiving the BSoD.

But when I forked up $2,000 for my desktop exclusively to be used for my online ventures, I vowed to keep it in "perfect" condition so that I never would have to face my old nemesis again. And I regularly backed up everything just in case I did.

That day came Friday. Thanks to my backups everything is OK. Honestly, it's been 2 years since I purchased this computer and no matter how well you keep it, every once in a while a reinstall is necessary. It took me about 12 hours to get everything back. In the end, my computer runs faster and I was able to improve my backup process for the future.

I suppose this is one of those "unexpected" things in life that you just gotta deal with and I should be grateful that it's only my computer and not my health or something more serious. Then again, the BSoD drives me crazy and I want nothing more than for every engineer at Microsoft to have their cell phone magically stop working tonight and display a BSoD to them, so that those bastards know how I feel.