Stand back! I'm going to try [computer] science!
I want to share this with y'all. See, I wasn't going to use the computer much today. I'd logged onto my lappy for about 10 minutes at maybe 7:30 this morning to check e-mails and Facebook, and I chatted with Sarah briefly to tell her that I wasn't going to be meeting peeps in Raleigh for lunch because I determined that it was frivolous of me to do so after having just spent an arguably exorbitant amount of money on my credit card over the weekend.
I shut down the computer, talked to Robert on the phone for maybe half an hour, and then I thought, "Oh, hey! I should update my Amazon wishlist and see if maybe people will actually buy stuff off of it for my birthday!" so I started up the lappy once more, only when I went to log on, it gave me an error, telling me that the User Profile something something would not or could not load.
I restarted, because that's the first thing I imagine one does. It's the first thing I do. No luck. Tried again. Noop. So then I got angry. Fist-shaking, obscenity-flying angry. I took a picture of the error through my phone and informed Facebook of my anger, in an acceptable fashion.
Then I inadvertently informed Facebook in a not-so-acceptable fashion. Because I'm silly and work in auto-pilot mode sometimes. In this situation, I wanted to rant to Sarah about the problem. But rather than go through my contacts and check her name, my fingers typed "32665" in the "To:" section, and I didn't think twice. Until after I sent it and realized I had no recollection of selecting her name. I checked my sent messages folder and saw that I did, indeed, tell Facebook the following:
"Son of a cock-sucking monkey-fucker! I can't even log into my computer now. I wanted to update my Amazon wishlist, but my user profile cannot be loaded... WHAT?"
I ran upstairs with Little Dude in tow, logged onto AJ's computer, signed him out of Facebook so I could sign myself in, and my status was right there on top of my news feed, with zero likes or comments, with a timestamp of "about a minute ago." So I deleted that mofo, logged myself out, logged AJ back in, and signed off. [I later saw that Richard sent me a message saying he saw the update before it was deleted, haha.]
Over the weekend, Robert had shown me how to access BIOS on my computer, so I thought, "Maybe that will be useful information." Then I realized that while I *thought* I was paying attention to him, I clearly was not. "Which F key was it?" I tried a few and came up with one that had a whole bunch of options, and I thought, "AAAH, is one of these it? Don't select things you don't know about. Just pick what you understand." So I went into Safe Mode, and my profile loaded up just fine. I could only assume that that meant the error wasn't flip-your-shit-worthy, since the profile could be accessed at all. But what do I know?
So while in Safe Mode, you can clearly see that you're there. We all know this, right? It reads, "SAFE MODE," quite obviously. But in case you miss such indicators, a box pops up to inform you that you are in Safe Mode and provides information on what you can and cannot do and such. It also mentions some troubleshooting options and how to get started on implementing them. So I clickety-click, and it asks me if I want it to search for solutions. Sure. That's why I'm there. So it's like, "Well, here's your problem!" and it reads, "Problem detected: Windows is in safe mode." Thanks... I get why it does that. It's the equivalent of, "First things first: is the computer plugged in? Good. Now is it on? Okay. Moving forward." BUT. I should know that I'm in Safe Mode, right? Clearly labeled, and there's a lengthy box of information further indicating such. If I can't figure that out, then I'm probably not smart enough to have gotten to where I was to receive the message that told me that my problem was that I was in Safe Mode.
But I digress. So blah blah, I found the option to do a system recovery, and I made sure to THOROUGHLY READ this and to make sure I wasn't thinking this was something innocuous and find out that I deleted everything. But this doesn't do that. I went back to my last update, which was on the 18th, and the only thing missing would be Trillian, which I downloaded yesterday. Maybe something went wrong there? I don't know. Anyway, so I got that started, and it said to just let it do its thing, no touchies.
And then the computer turned off. So I thought it was finished, since it let me turn it back on, but unbeknownst to me, it just turned off because the fan had had enough. I just didn't realize that because this was the first time it had allowed me to immediately start up again without giving me a scary blue screen and promptly saying "Good day!" once more. Anyway, like I said, unbeknownst to me, so I thought the system recovery was complete, tried to log in the usual way, but no luck. Sarah started to ask if I had an installation disk, and I don't, because... because I don't. I asked if that was the only remaining option, and she said she'd have to do some research to find out. In the meantime, I went back in Safe Mode to see what else I could figure out, and I received an error message indicating that the system recovery never finished, and it asked if I'd like to try again. Yes. So I did.
And then it finished for realsies that time, and it prompted me to log in, so I did. AND IT WORKED.
I feel like a genius.
I still haven't updated my Amazon wishlist though. (I was just going to pick some DDR game for the 360. AJ said I shouldn't do that since the 360 is going to be rendered obsolete, but I wouldn't need Xbox Live to play it, so whatever.)