Treachery!

Man alive. Remember last month when I told you my life was playing April Fool's games on me? Well, that little pattern hasn't quit. Last night, I was fooling around on my computer when it froze up. This has almost never happened on my computer so I was a bit concerned. My concern grew when it happened again after I restarted. I kept trying various things to avoid the crash such as avoiding Firefox since it seemed to look up each time I used that program. Issues kept popping up though ranging from the Blue Screen of Death proclaiming it intended to do a physical memory dump to the boot screen declaring loudly that it wasn't aware of this "hard drive" I spoke of. I turned the computer off, and left it for the night in hopes that the problem would just resolve itself (I'm a firm believer that computers, like cars, are self-healing organisms).


The next morning the computer did in fact boot up okay and didn't crash right off the bat. I still avoided Firefox but apart from some lag issues nothing happened until around one in the afternoon when it crashed again. It started the same trend of blue screens and boot errors as it had the day before so I grew morbidly concerned. I told my boss that I would be offline for a while trying to get the computer back up to its proper health. After much coercing, I got it to start up again and immediately backed up all my work files (I'd backed up my personal files the night before) and tried running virus scans and spyware scans. The computer froze. I rebooted it and it insisted that I did not in fact have any hard drive. I spent the next several hours trying things like booting from a CD (fail), flicking the computer (fail), and reinstalling Windows to one of my external drives (fail). This was very bad because my computer is my livelihood and I can't afford to buy another computer at the moment. Eventually, heartbroken, I performed an autopsy and removed pieces of the casing. I took out the hard drive, did things like blow on it (old fashioned Nintendo cartridge-style) and then put it back in. Only when I put it back in, the pins pushed into the hard drive further than they had been when I had taken it out. I closed everything back up, rebooted and voila. It works again. Or at least it does so far. Its not lagging though or having any of the other issues it was previously. So, the moral of the story is, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by just poking at random bits of computer with my finger. So if anyone ever tells you that won't fix a computer then... like... punch them. Or something.