Verity is the pseudonym of a programmer based in the UK. She can be contacted at [email protected].
Ugh. 7:50 am. Stagger hastily out of bed propelled by realisation that I am horribly late. Have overslept after outrageous contravention of No Small Hours on a Weekday rule by Scottish Jim, George, and Sandra. Scottish Jim brought round his new Lord of the Rings DVD complete with bonus Tom Bombadil scenes excised from cinema release, bonus director's commentary subtitles in Native Dwarf, and bonus CD featuring elfish poetry highlights from the saga movingly read by top international cast led by Patrick Stewart. All of which bonuses eagerly lapped up by friends late into night, ignoring my copious yawns—initially simulated, latterly very real. Question: Am I the last human being alive to find the telly-tubbies of Middle Earth resistible? Answer: apparently, yes.
So, moving with the wonderful grace that a refreshing 3/8 night's sleep gives to our awakening limbs, to kitchen to activate kettle, stagger back via living room turning on PC for e-mail, to bathroom to clean teeth, return to living room to find PC still booting up.
Correction. Not booting, but clicking. Click, click, click, pause, click, click, click. Stuck at the white Win2K screen of stuckness.
Cold feeling at back of the neck. What this? Have I got deathwatch morse code beetle? Did a dear little hobbit escape during last night's DVD-fest and get his little hairy toes trapped in the mechanism? Hard disks no longer fail do they? Surely, hard-disk failure abandoned as design feature in 1990s, along with having two serial ports and keyboards with nice curly cables. Try to remember when made backup. Try to remember if made a backup. Prospect of paying Stupid Tax at top rate looms large.
Can't bear futile clicking any longer. PC will not respond to three-fingered salute, nor to reset button, nor yet to On/Off button. Pull out its power cord. Shower and dress rapidly in state of shock, thinking. Perhaps PC also tired from being up late. Perhaps will boot normally, given a second chance. Come on little PC, don't be shy. You haven't done anything wrong and you're not in trouble. Just come back up for Auntie Verity. No soap. Ok, perhaps will boot in Safe Mode. Gah. Last try: Homer Mode, which is Safe Mode plus murmuring 'please-please-please-please-please.' Click, click, click.
Must go work now. Already wildly late. Spend whole day in state of fret. What if can't get into hard disk at all? What source code and articles do I have copies of? Is world to be deprived of my unpublished risqué poems? Civilisation is teetering on the edge. What about all my e-mail? What about all the registration codes for software in e-mail messages? And is my Bayesian spam filter corpus a corpse? Cannot face another four months training it up—a kitten would be less time consuming. At 5:29 pm grab a selection of service pack CD-ROMs and bolt for home to tend the invalid.
Invalid still not booting. Try invalid with its very own Win2K CD-ROM. Boots up. Hurrah! Searching for previous installations—getting dreaded click, click, click. Hands off, Verity, let her roll. What's this? 'The registry cannot load the hive (file) \SystemRoot\System32\Config\Software. It is corrupt.' Aaaargh. I might have known. The Registry. 'We have met before, Verity Stob, on my home planet Registros. On that occasion, you prevailed. This time, matters will be different. Ha ha ha ha.'
What's that Mr. Windows Install Program? Do I have a recovery disk? Why you are a little tease! Backup is for punters. Off you go and make a new system directory. Watch in dread as Windows slowly reestablishes itself. Reboot, bring up Explorer in horrible 800×600 mode, browse C: drive. Hurrah again! Stuff all still there, poems still there, civilisation saved. However, by no means out of woods yet, have still to reinstall special drivers, patches, programs, everything.
Start with Norton Internet Security. Bought upgrade recently, fortunately still have download. Great to think of dear old Peter Norton protecting me. Wonder why he is always in shirtsleeves. Perhaps he works in an office where the engineer can never quite suss a glitch in the air con... What's this? 'Configuring Windows Installer.' Uh-oh—this dialog nearly always heralds disaster. Windows Installer is military wing of the Registry, the thing that outrageously makes you produce the original CD-ROM to uninstall an app and my personal Most Ornery Program in the Universe. Yup, here we go: 'Norton Internet Security Installation has failed. Do you want to try to install again.' Yes, thanks for the diagnostic, Mr. Windows Installer. Perhaps it wants me to delete the files from the old installation. Nope, that's not what it wants. Perhaps it wants properly patched up Win2K.
Hmm. Need to go on Net to get Win2K security patches. Need Win2K security patches to go on Net. Catch-0x16.
Reluctantly plug in cable modem. Activity LED, which I remember as being like a flickering candle, burns continuously. Must bolster defences. Try to download AVG antivirus. AVG download page not working. Download free ZoneAlarm firewall. ZoneAlarm goes into frenzy of intrusive little dialogs. Is this ok? Is that ok? Is the other ok? Maybe, well, what, YES, YES, ALL RIGHT, STOP BOTHERING ME.
Run Windows update. Windows update says: You need 41 critical updates. Not all of which demand a reboot of their own. Halfway through download, downloader crashes.
What's the time now? Half past eleventy-one am. Have another go at Norton. Find Norton help page on Symantec web site. Others have had my difficulty. Suggests deleting all files and registry entries. Do this. Install fails earlier than before. Am lit up with rage. In what I later recognise to be an error of judgement caused by stress and tiredness, I delete Norton Internet Security installation file. Turn off machine. Go to bed.
During sleep, by mysterious brain process remember that ran Disk Defragmenter just before hobbit-fest. Was this cause of registry corruption? Seems not unlikely.
Next day, return to attack more calmly, now armed with CD-ROM of nonWindows Installer-using virus checker, borrowed from work. Machine is sodden with viruses: Nachi-A here, Agobot-U there. Seen nothing like it since I fixed friend-who-always-opens-all-e-mail-attachments's machine. Fury returns. Am worn to a frazzle, stressed out, have a half-crippled, messed-up machine that really needs a complete wiping and starting again, and all for why? Ok, perhaps a little culpable with state of backups, but who designed Disk Defragmenter program, useless installer program, RPC mechanism that gets infected by viruses as soon as exposed to Net and appalling binary centralised database of settings whose corruption causes whole machine to collapse like deflated balloon?
You know, I'm sorry to say this, but I can't help feeling it would perhaps be a really good idea if somebody came up with a sensible alternative to Windows for use in PCs.
What? Why are you all looking at me like that?
DDJ
