Blue screen

There’s something I need to do, something so important I have to do it… but just thinking about doing it scares me so… and I’ve been delaying it, procrastinating about it since last week yet. I guess I have this ‘computer anxiety disease’ most non-techies are going through. Nothing too technical actually, I just need to format our desktop computer’s hard drive and install programs on it. Buttt.. just thinking about that format thingy is making me uneasy… ugh, what if I do it on the wrong partition??? What if some system devices won’t work?

Our desktop computer has been acting weird lately. Ever since we arrived from our Cebu trip, it’s been giving us this strange behaviour. Initially, it won’t turn on when the power button is pressed and sometimes it did. I checked out all the connections and they’re all secure. Now it’s acting badly, it just restarts on start up, so I can’t go to the Windows XP login anymore. Our computer has two operating systems (Win98 and XP) installed on it, and during start up, it goes to the OS choices menu (my mom uses Win98 for her structural analysis software). Anyway, the computer behaves weirdly when you choose XP, it just restarts, but when you choose Win98, it does fine. I decided that the XP drive is the one with the problem, so I took the installation disk to repair it, but it gave me more problems instead – the computer just restarts halfway during the installation and this process repeats endlessly… I cancelled this annoying repetition and I got this dreadful blue screen instead:


 yikes…the dreadful screen of death!

I took a pic of it, its a lot faster instead of writing down the error infos, so I can send to one of my online consultants, the Prague Connection (my sis’ hubby). Sigh. And to think that years ago, I used to do a LOT of techie stuff when we had our internet café – open up those CPU cases, check connections or plug some devices or cards, create partitions, format drives, install programs and did some troubleshooting. I guess it was survival instinct that got me through – we didn’t have any technical staff to assist us during those times. I just browsed and researched on the internet when computer problems came up, but mostly I asked help online from the pros – my bro and the Prague Connection. Anyway, after some techie talks (arghhh…) with my sis hubby and following instructions, doing something on the CMOS setup, failed attempts of repairing XP and all other techie stuff… the only solution we came up is to format the drive and install a new clean XP OS on it.

I decided to do it next week. That would give me more time to gather up enough courage to actually do it. In the meantime, I’ll just enjoy my weekend over at the newly opened SM City-Bacolod. 🙂