Posting from my Lappy!
It's fixed! One of my dad's coworkers offered to look at it, and when he started poking around, he determined that neither the memory card, nor the hard drive were bad (he could access the BIOS and it did pop up the initial welcome screen), so figured something must have gone screwy with the OS. He wiped the drive, put XP Pro on it, booted it up and now it works. I told my dad to make sure he reimburses his coworker nicely for the freebie Windows. I reinstalled the 2G memory card I got for Christmas and so far everything seems to be working just swimmingly, which is good, considering that running Windows now means I have to run an antivirus program, too. I took it for a weekend jaunt to Philadelphia, and used it to play music in my car during the drive home.
My dad said his coworker admitted that he wasn't familiar with Linux, so it's possible that the original OS might have been repairable in more knowledgeable hands. The whole affair confuses me, because I had been led to believe that Linux was supposed to be more stable than Windows, and I certainly didn't mess with any of the programming, so how and why it went bad remains a mystery. I haven't ruled out the kernel of an idea (kernel...geddit?) that maybe the hard drive is partially to blame. Maybe it's beginning to go bad? I don't know. I couldn't find anything on the Asus forums that resembled the problem I was having (I would turn it on, the Asus welcome screen would pop up, but then the screen would simply blink grey / black, grey / black, like it was caught in a boot cycle or something. Occasionally a cursor would appear on the black screen, sometimes a quick flash of gobble-dee-gook code would appear. If you were quick about it and hit the right key, you could access the BIOS. Trying to boot in Safe Mode did nothing. Making changes to the BIOS did nothing). I'm really curious about it, but for right now I'm just glad to have my dear, darling Lappy back, and working in a way I mostly understand. Never thought I'd say this, but thank god for Windows.
My dad said his coworker admitted that he wasn't familiar with Linux, so it's possible that the original OS might have been repairable in more knowledgeable hands. The whole affair confuses me, because I had been led to believe that Linux was supposed to be more stable than Windows, and I certainly didn't mess with any of the programming, so how and why it went bad remains a mystery. I haven't ruled out the kernel of an idea (kernel...geddit?) that maybe the hard drive is partially to blame. Maybe it's beginning to go bad? I don't know. I couldn't find anything on the Asus forums that resembled the problem I was having (I would turn it on, the Asus welcome screen would pop up, but then the screen would simply blink grey / black, grey / black, like it was caught in a boot cycle or something. Occasionally a cursor would appear on the black screen, sometimes a quick flash of gobble-dee-gook code would appear. If you were quick about it and hit the right key, you could access the BIOS. Trying to boot in Safe Mode did nothing. Making changes to the BIOS did nothing). I'm really curious about it, but for right now I'm just glad to have my dear, darling Lappy back, and working in a way I mostly understand. Never thought I'd say this, but thank god for Windows.