"Computer death?" you ask. "But you've only had that computer for less than a week! You're not even connected to the internet! How the hell could you have computer death?"
I thank you for your concern and respond: I have no fucking idea. I bought PC GAMER magazine over the weekend because it came with a demo disc; I wanted to see what Max Payne would look like with my video card. I installed it on Saturday afternoon and it worked beautifully. I shut my computer down and then headed off to Manhattan to watch Game 1.
When I got home, depressed over the Yankees' meltdown, I wanted to play with my computer a little bit before I crashed. I turned it on, and before Windows ME even loaded I got an error message:
Invalid system disk
Replace and hit any key
I checked every drive about 40 times, but they were all empty. Of course they were empty - I don't have any software, and I've only used the damn thing twice. So I called up Dell Tech Support at roughly 11:45pm.
When I got off the phone at 1:15am, after fruitless and frustrating attempts to fix the problem, I was told that I'd get a call at 10am from a "Senior Technical Manager". And so I went to bed.
When I woke up, I realized that I had forgotten to set my clock back, but it didn't matter - nobody called me. So I called them, and it turned out that whoever I had spoken with the night before hadn't even logged that I'd called. No matter. After another hour of tinkering, I was told to just reformat my hard drive and then re-install everything. Which took another hour or so. THEN, after re-installing WindowsMe, I saw that none of my drivers were up; my display was awful; I had no sound; I was ready to jump out of my 2nd floor window as many times as possible until I seriously hurt myself. But then I called Tech Support again, and it only took 20 minutes for a representative to walk me through the re-installation of my drivers.
So now my computer seems to be working again (although it doesn't have DirectX 8 anymore, just Direct7.1), although I'm very wary of trusting it. I played around with a borrowed copy of Grim Fandango and it totally froze up my computer, leading to many anxious restarts.
Oh, and here's some more bummer news. I was all ready to hook up the apartment with Digital Cable and RoadRunner;
About the only good thing that happened this weekend (aside from running into the woman unexpectedly at the bar on Saturday night) was when
Gotta get back to this insanity-laden photo-archive-database ridiculousness.