hah. i made this post last night. or at least i thought i did. came this morning to look and put up an update and the text isn’t here. apparently, it wiped itself out? oddness indeed.
i had relayed that perhaps the system wasn’t dead after all. of course, i was wrong. it is now stripped and ready for return to the loaner company. the parts that are mine (memory, power supply, video and sound cards) will go up on ebay tonight. proceeds toward the eventual imac purchase.
i am really very serious when i say i am done, done, done, with pcs. it’s a sad thing, really… i’ve been a ‘pc head’ since the early 80’s. but in truth, i am tired of fighting with peripherals and drivers, sloppy code and sloppier support. and i suspect the cause of my catastrophic loss is the combined fault of creative’s crap x-fi drivers (google it, it’s a damn mess) and microsoft’s automatice update service.
the problem began after installing the x-fi gamer edition. silly me, i was so excited about having a better card. but from the time i installed it, it was nothing but trouble. drivers conflicted with the onboard audio, disabling that made it work briefly, then microsoft update ran and from that point forward, it was nothing but blue screen, blue screen, blue screen, ‘we’re sorry, but an important microsoft service has failed and this application must be closed.’
well that’s all nice and good except there IS NO APPLICATION OPEN except the basis shell environment. of course the application it was referring to was the service set for the sound card. and somewhere between the first crash and the oh…. crash number 50 (i stopped counting after that), one or the other decided it would be nifty to corrupt the ntfs.sys file.
this was thursday, of course. i had spent the week prior replacing pieces that died one after the other…. the memory. no worries, it was time for an upgrade anyway. then the video card. no worries, i wanted a better card anyway! then the sound card. no worries, this one has some nice software and the thx will be amazing!
only it never was.
mind you, i am NOT a computer idiot. i’ve built every machine i’ve owned since about 1983 onward.
but this was just beyond my ability to decipher, let alone fix. and when i finally figured out what had happened to my two data drives… well, that just took the rest of the fight out of me. this makes twice in less than 5 years that i’ve lost, literally, every shred of data i have… due to the insanity that is driver conflicts and the resulting fall out.
do not talk to me about backups. i had them in 2002 and they were bad thanks to living life as a freaking human being and forgetting to keep them at > 70 degrees. I DON’T EVEN LIVE AT > 70!!!
this time, the backup to FTP site that was supposed to have run at 3am on tuesday didn’t actually run. nor did it tell me it didn’t.
and the backup i ran on wednesday, when i knew “something is seriously wrong”…. i placed on my data drive, figuring it would BE SAFE.
i was out of dvds.
do i know how the bloody hell windows decided it was cool to blow away the partition and fat on my data drive? well, i know i damn sure didn’t tell it to do it. but there it sits, a freaking pile of crap.
i’ve lost:
– over 22 years of email archives (most of which i actually managed to save from the disaster of 2002!!!),
– all of my professional samples for business and process work,
– all of my originals for my artwork,
– all of my vocal recordings spanning poetry, performance art, AIs, and other bits and pieces never released publicly,
– all of my ASCAP registered lyrics (most of which were not on the blog or stored elsewhere),
– my documents archive containing correspondence and snail mail letters exchanged with people who have passed away, and
– all of my screenshots and related materials from over 12 years of friendships and gaming online (muds, moos, mushes, to mmos).
but more than this, i have finally lost every shred of confidence in microsoft specifically and in the PC as a viable, long-term technology solution.
i am TIRED of fighting with sloppy code and reluctant OEMs. i am TIRED of crap support and the insult of having to pay $35 a call for support on something I JUST BOUGHT. i am TIRED of my activation key expiring after X reinstalls because — fuck you microsoft, but if your shit hoses my machine enough to require me to reinstall your piece of shit OS X+1 times, you bloody well ought to allow it without putting me through 2 hours hold time and some barely sentient fuck in southern asia who can’t speak my language and doesn’t give a shit that i’m just about bald from frustration with your “amazing advance in technology” that has fucked me YET AGAIN.
sigh.
whatever. it’s already the past, you know? let’s just hope that when i finally do get to the point where i can afford the imac, and it gets here, it treats me better. else i may well become a luddite after all. and believe me, that won’t be a good thing.