Saturday, November 6, 2010

Well I Did it This Time

Flashback a few days to Monday evening. I was typing up my 80s list, I swear I really was. After making the list and getting a few pages into my overview I noticed my computer was running slow. Listening to . . . And Justice For All it was skipping, this had never happened before so I looked up the task manager. Turns out I had a lot of processes running with the name svchost.exe. I figured one of these was probably too much so I closed it. My computer gave me a 60 second countdown to shut down and I closed everything saved what I was working on an assumed my computer would restart and I'd learn that that was one process that shouldn't be closed. Well not so simple.

My computer shut down just fine but restarting was another matter entirely. In fact five days later it still hasn't restarted. It starts, goes to a Windows XP startup screen, then back to the beginning, over and over and over and over and over again. I tried to start in safe mode, safe mode with networking, safe mode with command prompt, last known configuration that worked, debugging mode, tried rebooting and countless other things. I tried to run a HDD (hard drive diagnostic) test and the 2 minute test took over 12 hours to get half way done. Same set of problems with the longer (100 minutes) test that never got past 20%.

As a hail mary I redownloaded Windows on another computer (the same one I'm typing this on), burnt it to a disc and tried to reinstall, but that worked about as well as waving a wooden stick at my computer. So I'm nearly giving up hope and well computers die, it happens, but of course I didn't have the foresight to save my word documents on to an external hard drive, so it might be goodbye, director index, films by year, and previous writings. It's happened before and it never gets easier to swallow.

So perhaps I'll start from scratch again, type up the next top ten list. Maybe I'll think of another way to fix my computer that might possibly work, or a way to save my documents and just junk my frequently troublesome laptop altogether.

In the meantime I have begun my 90s research, and as an added bonus started a Coen brothers marathon partially because nearly all of their films can qualify for my best of the decade lists and also because I'm psyching myself up for True Grit. I've been enjoying tremendously revisiting some of my favorites, and numerous films that just deserved a second look for whatever reason. I know that the more contemporary my list(s) gets the more people will disagree with nearly every choice, but so be it, I'm sure I wouldn't agree with your list either.

So accept my lame apology for a self inflicted bit of idiocy on my part, and know that more of my witty film writing is just around the corner.

btw if anyone knows anything about fixing this particular problem don't hesitate to let me know

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