So… radio silence when I’ve been pretty consistent doesn’t bode well, does it? Nope.

See, Mindy (the laptop) had a bit of a stroke Wednesday night that just about gave me one as well. The irony was that I was typing along on my NaNovel [up to 30184 as of this morning] and thought

‘Self, I should really backup the novel and some other things on this computer because it’s been a little while since I’ve done it.’

Self agreed that this was a good idea so We reached over to turn on the external harddrive (which, come to think of it, should be named Mork, so that’s what we’ll call him from now on) and approximately  two seconds later I got the [shh] blue screen of death [/shh].

Considering myself the good helper monkey, even when panic is curling around the edges of my sanity, I grab a pen and jot down what sort of error it was (something about a Kernel, turns out that is *really* bad) and some 0x… codes figuring that a more Windows-savvy person might need them. Then I hit enter, which is what it told me to do.

The world skreeches to a halt.

By that I mean, suddenly Windows cannot start because a .dll file is either corrupt or missing. Rationalizing that no files fell out of the computer when I shook it (no, I didn’t really, I’m going for humor) I was betting on the former and feeling rather corrupted myself. Ugh! Now, do I know where my book and discs for Mindy are? Nope. Are they somewhere in the mess that is my office? Yup. Do I try to find them? Yup. Do I actually find them? Nope.

So, an hour on the phone with India (tech support, for which I have no warranty) determines that no, really, I cannot get past the error screen, no safe mode of any kind, nothing, and they are going to send me out another set of discs. Sigh… okay.

Thursday night Palmetto comes over to try and work her majic. Nope. She calls Will and has him bring himself, Kaleigh (sp? palmie, how do you spell your laptop’s name?), and his toys over and he proceeds to spend four or five hours working on my computer. How lovely it is to have friends who know what they’re doing!

Things recovered: the NaNoNovel and probably 95% of my photos from the last year and a half.

Things not recovered/not recoverable: *because it was’t for lack of trying* 1 1/2 years of emails, address book, various and sundry other documents, webpages in development, 5% of photos.

Oh well. The important stuff we got, the rest I’ll deal.

Of course, then, at 11pm on a Thursday night we’ve not eaten so go out to find food. Y’all the level of punchiness going on, had we been pulled over by cops they would have thought we were high. No, officer, just hungry. It probably wouldn’t have helped our case.

Anyway, Friday the replacement discs arrive so Friday night I reinstall Windows. I took the wrong turn at Bakersfield or some such because I ended up with Windows XP at a resolutely suited for a far-sighted fruit bat. And the slide to adjust? It’s not sliding. Nope. Not gonna work. Meanwhile XP is telling me that I need to change resolutions because the freaking Start menu doesn’t even fit on the screen… and there’s nothing on the computer yet!

Can I get a ‘duh’ here?

So, take two, I decided to use the copy of Ubuntu that palmie had left me, and installed it. Even with the o_0 moments brought on by needing to make partition decisions I managed to get in installed. Cool, huh? My computer is now WAY more geek than I am.

Start to install drivers so I can use stuff. No need, internet, it’s there. Tablet. there. External HD. there. Cooooooool.

So I’m liking Ubuntu. I’m all Linux happy, setting up my email so I can check my 40,000 addresses and not have things go bounce, that sort of thing. I do it, email is working. Things are happy happy. I grab the novel file from the External (Mork, btw), it opens up, cool. I go into the music files thinking I can import them into the linux music player thing. Nope. Sigh… format issues, oh well, I’ll upload some tunes in the morning so I’ll have something to write to.

Now comes the fun bit. Now I want to put PSE 3.0 on here so I can resume my graphics work for people who are wanting things like soon.

SCREEEEEEETCH!

Not happening. Why? Linux doesn’t understand PSE installers. Does not compute. No way. No how. Hello, freakout, I thought I sent you away.

I gave up, went to bed, slept off the frustration.

Now, of course, I have a write-in Saturday, so I cannot redo the installation yet because I need the laptop to be workable for a bit, so I leave it alone. I have my hp desktop (Teddy) still, so I decide to install PSE on him, and I can use my new back-up thumb drive to move graphics files from one to the other so I can still build (rebuild that is) webpages in the living room (because I know CSS now, I don’t need Dreamweaver–which is good, because it went the way of those other files and I’m clueless where my install and codes are for it!) but do the graphic bits on the desktop. Okay. But that’s not going to last overly long because the hp is eventually going to go to Mom. I promised.

So, I might be a Linux poser through Thanksgiving (or whenever I hit 50K) but after that I think I’ll retry the XP install, figure out where I went wrong.