(no subject)
I hate computers.
I had heard of the "blue screen of death". If you work with computers long enough, you are sure to come across the term. It's one of those things that make techs shudder involuntarily. What it is is just a stark blue screen with indecipherable white text. What it means is that everything that was your computer's working mind has just been skull-fucked into oblivion.
So when I saw it, in the midst of a WoW session, I just sort of gawked. It's like some elusive beast in the jungle. You marvel at its sheer power, and yet know it's about to rip your face off. It was one of those "Oh, so that's what it looks like" moments, followed by a medely of words not allowed to be spoken in front of elders or people of higher social standing.
Of course, immediately you hit the restart button, thinking it was just a near brush with death. But no. It's just gone.
I attempted a reinstallation. Utter failure. Just more BSoD's. So I purchased a new, bigger, bad-ass-mother of a hard drive. It came in the mail within two days, which was a miracle within itself considering the amount of time things usually take to be delivered from point A to point B. I jammed that bad boy in there, and attempted an install with three, count them 1, 2, 3 different highly pirated Windows disks. Of course if they had worked, I wouldn't be writing this from a laptop.
Finally, I rummaged through various disks and found the system restore disk from my computer, which was created years ago. It worked like a charm. Until I hit the "activate Windows" section. What this involves is using your product key to generate a number that is 39749378973 x 10^5 long, then repeating that number very very slowly to a computer, which generates your activation code. After failing that test twice, I braved the Microsoft tech support line.
Apparently when I wasn't looking, Microsoft took its entire techincal support team and moved them right into the dead center of fucking India.
Of course, you wouldn't know it was India by the way they are all named "Steve" and/or "Jennifer". In my 4 calls to the support office, I talked to two Steves and two Jennifers, all with completely different voices. So the Steves/Jennifers each painstaking took down every bit of information I knew about myself, then they would redirect me to another person to handle the problem. This person would ask me to repeat the gargantuan number again, then my product ID, then the number again, and then would tell me that I needed to talk with Sony, who made parts of my computer. Apparently, Sony has a higher authority to activate Microsoft's products than they do.
By this time, I had worked on this computer for several hours, and my limits of patience were dying slowly right in front of my eyes. I was redirected to Sony, where I spoke to a nice man by the name of Carl. I repeat the whole story as chronicled above, and tell him why I was directed to him. I fully expected him to hear my story, and say "Oh yes, I can activate that shit for you right now." What I did not expect him to do is laugh. Fully and openly.
Carl informed me that Steve and Jennifer were "full of shit". I agreed, and asked him what it was that Sony could do for me. Apparently, the system restore disk shouldn't need to be activated. If the hardware was the same as when I bought the product, then everything should run fine. Well that sets off the "oh fuck" siren in my head, since I built this bitch basically from the ground up. Of course I didn't tell Carl that. I did let it slip that I had added some RAM and a second HD. This was a bad mistake because I was then instructed to remove these items and try the entire installation again. But fuck all that, because I didn't do that at all.
I found my old Vaio tower, scribed the product key into the activation, and it went through. Amazingly. However, somehow some crazy ass virus jumped onto my formatted, recently installed operating system, which is of course, impossible. So witchcraft had to have been involved. Everything I attemped resulted in a crash, and eventually I was locked into a perpetual loop of automatic restarts. This led to more formatting, more installing, and now here I am.
Every update I perform, I'm watching the bar go up, giving it encouragement. It's like I'm worshipping some dark diety, hoping that it suddenly doesn't get the whim to smite me. So far, it has worked out this go-round. But I refuse to jinx it.
More Success/Failure to follow.
I had heard of the "blue screen of death". If you work with computers long enough, you are sure to come across the term. It's one of those things that make techs shudder involuntarily. What it is is just a stark blue screen with indecipherable white text. What it means is that everything that was your computer's working mind has just been skull-fucked into oblivion.
So when I saw it, in the midst of a WoW session, I just sort of gawked. It's like some elusive beast in the jungle. You marvel at its sheer power, and yet know it's about to rip your face off. It was one of those "Oh, so that's what it looks like" moments, followed by a medely of words not allowed to be spoken in front of elders or people of higher social standing.
Of course, immediately you hit the restart button, thinking it was just a near brush with death. But no. It's just gone.
I attempted a reinstallation. Utter failure. Just more BSoD's. So I purchased a new, bigger, bad-ass-mother of a hard drive. It came in the mail within two days, which was a miracle within itself considering the amount of time things usually take to be delivered from point A to point B. I jammed that bad boy in there, and attempted an install with three, count them 1, 2, 3 different highly pirated Windows disks. Of course if they had worked, I wouldn't be writing this from a laptop.
Finally, I rummaged through various disks and found the system restore disk from my computer, which was created years ago. It worked like a charm. Until I hit the "activate Windows" section. What this involves is using your product key to generate a number that is 39749378973 x 10^5 long, then repeating that number very very slowly to a computer, which generates your activation code. After failing that test twice, I braved the Microsoft tech support line.
Apparently when I wasn't looking, Microsoft took its entire techincal support team and moved them right into the dead center of fucking India.
Of course, you wouldn't know it was India by the way they are all named "Steve" and/or "Jennifer". In my 4 calls to the support office, I talked to two Steves and two Jennifers, all with completely different voices. So the Steves/Jennifers each painstaking took down every bit of information I knew about myself, then they would redirect me to another person to handle the problem. This person would ask me to repeat the gargantuan number again, then my product ID, then the number again, and then would tell me that I needed to talk with Sony, who made parts of my computer. Apparently, Sony has a higher authority to activate Microsoft's products than they do.
By this time, I had worked on this computer for several hours, and my limits of patience were dying slowly right in front of my eyes. I was redirected to Sony, where I spoke to a nice man by the name of Carl. I repeat the whole story as chronicled above, and tell him why I was directed to him. I fully expected him to hear my story, and say "Oh yes, I can activate that shit for you right now." What I did not expect him to do is laugh. Fully and openly.
Carl informed me that Steve and Jennifer were "full of shit". I agreed, and asked him what it was that Sony could do for me. Apparently, the system restore disk shouldn't need to be activated. If the hardware was the same as when I bought the product, then everything should run fine. Well that sets off the "oh fuck" siren in my head, since I built this bitch basically from the ground up. Of course I didn't tell Carl that. I did let it slip that I had added some RAM and a second HD. This was a bad mistake because I was then instructed to remove these items and try the entire installation again. But fuck all that, because I didn't do that at all.
I found my old Vaio tower, scribed the product key into the activation, and it went through. Amazingly. However, somehow some crazy ass virus jumped onto my formatted, recently installed operating system, which is of course, impossible. So witchcraft had to have been involved. Everything I attemped resulted in a crash, and eventually I was locked into a perpetual loop of automatic restarts. This led to more formatting, more installing, and now here I am.
Every update I perform, I'm watching the bar go up, giving it encouragement. It's like I'm worshipping some dark diety, hoping that it suddenly doesn't get the whim to smite me. So far, it has worked out this go-round. But I refuse to jinx it.
More Success/Failure to follow.