So my computer hates me. This is fast becoming a trend.

Actually, I'm pretty sure it doesn't hate me, it's just being a nice-sized biotch, which is hardly a surprise, because now that I'm getting some heavily-OT'd paychecks, it makes complete and total sense in a Murphy's Law-esque manner that just at a time when I could really use the extra money, something of mine would start to break down and cause me to have to spend an excess of it: the car, the computer, dvd player, my body.

I finally decided that my vacation would be a nice time to go ahead and do something that I'd really been putting off for a couple months, since the last major computer issue: reinstalling the OS. See, when I got the last fix, we found that for whatever reason, a sector of the drive had dumped and portions of my registry got eaten. Something to worry about, sure, but my bud at the computer shop corrected the vast majority of the problems, and while it wasn't a cure, it was a more than adequate fix. But I knew that sooner or later I'd be looking at a complete reinstall and wipe of the C:/ Drive.

So I bought a terrabyte external HD, and backed up the C:/ Drive, and...

... well...

I put it off.

Not because I fear reinstalling Windows or anything like that, but because... hell, I have a ridiculous amount of software I'd have to reinstall, and it would take the better part of a weekend to do it, and the better part of a week updating them and inserting add-ons, such as the freaking 100+ gig Poser runtime directories, my sets of Photoshop brushes/actions/filters and the add-ons for all the material/atmosphere/filter/plant/model sets in Vue that I have to painstakingly point. The program to. One. By. One. It's a little like fingernail torture for the mind.

So yeah, I was lazy. Because if I could take tedium like that, I'd be less into art and more into programming.

Well, I BSOD'd Thursday and watched my baby go through boot/no-go/reboot/no-go a couple times and decided that, and the recent problems with C4D running out of memory, were the Clarion Calls From God¹ That It Was Past Due. So I swallowed my pride, completely formatted the C: drive, reinstalled XP and all my motherboard/graphics card drivers, and downloaded Avira, which runs a full scan first thing. The program froze and I got another blue screen. So I'm thinking "bad sector/cluster/some shite", and on my bud's suggestion, uninstall Avira, run Check Disk, and download Avast, because Avira sometimes freaks with some systems, the same way Norton freaks if you try to run certain 3D programs.

So Check Disk comes back with absolutely no C: drive errors, Avast loads fine and runs a scan, and midway through the D: or F: drive, it freaks out too and the computer reboots. By now I'm starting to feel rainclouds forming over my head, since this week of vacation was going to be a good creative one for me (hey, I'm nothing if not stupidly optimistic!) and suddenly I'm beginning to see that go right down the f**king drain.

At that point, I say to hell with it, I'll run a checkdisk on both drives later tonight, and today I'll just work on installing Photoshop and writing some of my responses at DA. Well, as I sat writing a note response, the computer slowed to a crawl and blue screened again. With nothing at all accessing either the D or F drives.

So I'm beginning to think the problem might just be with the hardware. Possibly one of the sticks of RAM going bad, possibly a HD issue, or one with either the MB or Geforce drivers (which would be a small miracle, as it would cost me squat to fix). Most of the possibilities I'm seeing blow because I have no finances to cover anything like them until Thursday at the earliest, but I'll let the pros help me figure that out. If it does turn out that my art suffers this week because of this, I apologize ahead of time... I was feeling like I'd get some good stuff done this week, too, and I'm just as disappointed as the lot of yas.

^{1: I'm afraid my God is most likely not your God, or probably even the God you're thinking of. So don't go thinking I've given up on being a bona-fide heathen or anything silly like that.}



<sub>"Your moment of Zen:
This is the sound of one hand
not giving a fuck."

- Me, Haiku</sub>