Aaaaaaaand, I'm back, what'd I miss?!

Ohmygosh...it's The Internet! AT LAST!!! I'm saved!!!!!

I've been without my home computer for a couple days now; last week, my poor, abused desktop began acting a little...weird. It was being kind of sluggish. Throwing the occasional minor error at me "for no reason." And otherwise behaving in a way that made me sit back and think, Uh-oh...WHERE did I put all those system restore disks again...? 

Sure. Enough.

After a couple days of increasingly rebellious behavior, it finally threw in the towel on me for good, entered into an endless "booting...lol, just kidding, no I'm not! Want me to try to repair this of course you do because that's the ONLY option I'm going to give you! OK! Repairing...lol, just kidding, I can't fix this! I'm going to restart now, OK?" cycle and eventually forced me to really get my nerd on and communicate with it only through a command prompt.

Good times.

SO! I've spent the last two days trying to repair a really fried system...and then reinstalling a new system over the top of the hopelessly fried old one...and reinstalling all the software and resetting all the hardware settings and oh.my.GAHD., sometimes I kind of wish I wasn't a "computer" person because @^*@, this stuff is aggravating.

What can I save? What can't I save? Whaddya mean that folder wasn't part of my regular backups?! What the hell, what idiot unchecked it?! Oh. that would have been ME...wonder what I was thinking when I did that...

Things appear to be more or less back in business now; most of my files were recovered with relatively little pain, I've got the bulk of my 'critical' software (like, you know, Warcraft and Elder Scrolls Online) (pfffft, email, antivirus, who needs that stuff, focus on the important apps first, right?!) reinstalled or even upgraded in a couple cases, and then had the usual cleaning session that tends to follow on whenever this sort of thing happens.

My computer folders can be a lot like the junk drawer in the kitchen; over time, I've squirreled away things in so many places and then forgotten they were there.

You don't wanna know how many copies I had of the install files for SQL Server, versions 2000 through 2012. Because JUST having them on a CD isn't good enough for me, apparently, I need to ALSO have them copied onto my HARD DRIVE. 

Honestly, I cannot explain this. Any more than I can explain having "My Pictures" and "My Pictures(1)", and "My Pictures_Backup" - all of which contained the same 3.4 gig of photogenic moments in which the Denizens are indistinguishable smeary blurs of action. (This is, of course, the biggest time sink - I think it is completely impossible for me to simply and efficiently "clean up" a photo album, because I end up going, "D'awwwwwwww, I remember when Danger Mouse liked to wear dresses!" or "OMG, it's Mr. Bear! Huh, wonder whatever happened to that ratty old thing..." and so forth.)

At the moment, it's a pretty fast-running, solid machine - a lot like it was the day I so proudly and excitedly unboxed it for the very first time. Before I had loaded, and unloaded, and reloaded so many things onto it - trials of various software programs, video games of all kinds, weird little "here, try this INSTEAD of Microsoft Office, it'll be better because it's NOT Microsoft!" programs my fellow nerds were enthusing about, and so forth.

"Not computer people" are hard on computers in a certain way; they're ignorant of the sorts of things that can cause really big problems, and will innocently do things that really mess them up.

Like powering off during a patch installation because they got impatient, or reading half of the instructions on a website somewhere, going into regedit and oops!

I know better than that.

Which is why when I screw up a box, I do it on an epic scale. And usually haven't a prayer of figuring out what, exactly, it was specifically that I did to cause the explosion.

And then I don't even have the good sense to throw it into the trunk of the car, drive to the near Geek Haven, and throw both the computer and a crap-ton of cash at the nearest person in the store while screaming "FIX IT! FIX IT NOW! MAKE MACHINE GO-GO-GO!"

No indeed. I, the person who caused the huge problem, feel completely qualified to fix the problems I caused. I am a computer person! Feel my nerdly strength! Rawr...!!!

Aaaaaaaaaand, then I spend two days swearing, sweating, arguing with an inert machine, screaming about disks that aren't where I thought they were, backups that weren't done the way I thought they were, oh crap I accidentally reformatted the partition I manually backed everything up to {expletive expletive expletive expletive}!!! and so forth.

BUT, hopefully - I've got it worked out now.

For the most part.

Except for about three thousand security patches and other updates, restoring my email archives, and reinstalling the rest of my various financial, knitting, and other assorted programs. And restoring their backed-up files.

And my music folders.

Oh, geez.

It's going to be a looooooooong weekend, isn't it...