For all of us who feel only the deepest love and affection for the way computers have enhanced our lives, read on. At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the
auto industry and stated, “If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.” In response to Bill’s comments, General
Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could
continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive – but would run on only five percent of the roads.

6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single “This Car Has Performed an Illegal Operation” warning light.

7. The airbag system would ask “Are you sure?” before deploying.

8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

10. You’d have to press the “Start” button to turn the engine off.

Arrgh!!!!!!!!

I’ve spent the last couple of days dealing with random reboots and constant chkdsks from my PC. Yesterday I couldn’t access half my programs, so I immediately started backing up what I could. I’m not sure if I backed up my music files as everytime it was supposed to verify the files I’d get an error message because the files I backed up no longer matched the ones on the disk. I hope so because this morning it wouldn’t boot up at all. It won’t boot up, it won’t let me repair XP, won’t let me re-install it (I keep getting the blue screen o’ death with that one). Right now I’m trying to install XP on an older 60GB drive that went wonky three years ago. So far it seems to be taking it but it can’t install one file, and it could still go weird, as I remember after three attempts at reinstalling XP on this drive previously I couldn’t get more than like six colors when I finally finished installing it. We’ll see.

If it doesn’t work, there’s still the 13GB slave. It’ll mean I have to give up all the Wicca related stuff I’ve collected over the years, but at this point I’d just be glad to have my computer up and running again. If that works I’ll put the 120GB back in as a slave, salvage what I can then replace the drive. It’s all I can think of at this point.

ETA: Screw that idea. Installed XP, computer rebooted, rebooted again, then ran chkdsk. After it was done with that it rebooted again, then stalled (hung?). It’s gotta be the motherboard.