Pre-Historic Era

Doubled RAM. Worked great for one week. Everything's fast. Holy cow.

Fateful Day 1

I get the blue screen of death (BSOD). It tells me a bunch of numbers. Advises me to update my drivers. I do that and run the virus scan, just in case. Virus scan comes back clean. Everything looks fixed. I feel happy. Go to bed at around 3:00 a.m. after the win.

Fateful Day 2

Another BSOD. A slightly different combination of numbers that make no sense. Win refuses to stay operational. Everything shuts down. Force OS to not shut down. Run a ton of diagnostics, which takes about five hours. Finally decided to do a clean install on everything. Still fails. Finally it turned out that I needed some update installed first before installing a different update. This wasn't anywhere in the online manual. Feeling angry. But do another clean reinstall.

The day ended at 5:00 a.m. with another BSOD.

Fateful Day 3

Get up at 9:00 a.m. Hero Material almost becomes collateral damage. Another clean reinstall. Google every error message I get. MS Update won't update. I'm ready to go Kill Bill on IT.

Do a ton of regsvr32 commands for a ton of *.dll files. It turns out that the RAM upgrade is the one that went bad. In exactly one week after the upgrade. Take out the new RAM, put the old RAM. Hardware diagnostic says everything looks great.

Redo install. I'm getting very good at this now. I re-customize everything, esp. the default Outlook profile.

The day ends at 4:30 a.m. with MS Update downloading everything, but refusing to install highly critical security patches. Give up after trying about ten different fixes and workarounds. My eyes refuse to stay open. The war appears hopeless.

Fateful Day 4

Get up and test the final fix for MS Update. Downloads very slowly, but finally installs everything. Run a complete virus scan. The system's clean.

Casualties

• Four days of productivity.
• My sanity.
• Sleep.
• Rambo I — was going to watch it with Hero Material, but I couldn't pay attention and Hero Material got annoyed.
• All the King's Women Ch. 1 — dead; not recoverable.
• The Last Slayer notes update — dead, not recoverable.
• The Lat Slayer master file — managed to salvage. Must make another copy, just in case. (This was backed up via gmail, but gmail told me that the backup was corrupted. I almost died on the spot. Hero Material had to valiantly stop me from bashing my own head in.)
• All my customizations for Office & Win — not recoverable; must recreate everything.

If you sent me an email and never received a response, it probably means I never got your email in the first place since Outlook went a bit wonky during this period. Resend please.