the Dalaverse

I almost, almost had a post full of good news and hope last night. My computer suddenly took a dive for the worst and, instead of starting, began this check disk operation. Panicking, I took it down to the kitchen and begged two of the guys in my hall to help. First we unscrewed the panels on the back to clean our all the dust, then we sat there and left it run this disk check even though it seemed to get frozen. Within those two hours, I began to hope that it was trying to heal itself and that, between the disk check and the cleaning, it might be well again.

This was indeed what I thought happened when I started it back up. I tried to shut it down the regular way, and lo, it obeyed! So I turned it back on, bouncing in my seat, resolving to wait for for glee potential until it had remained operational for more than its usual runtime of an hour. I was planning the victory post in my head, to be written Old Testament-style with the computer gods bestowing mercy upon my supplicant head.

It was not to be. That one glorious shut-down notwithstanding, it's behaving same as it ever did.

There may be reason to hope for the future: George suggested I download the free version of XP Medic, which will scan Windows XP to tell me if there's anything wrong with it (to fix it, though, you have to buy the program; still, I'm willing to try this before taking it into a shop). I'm going to run that in Safe Mode this morning, and also start backing up files. I'll add my music (from the folder, not through iTunes itself, which probably won't even run in Safe Mode) to my old iPod, which has just enough space left and only contains files I can do without. I'm still clinging to a shred of hope that my music is hiding on the iPod Which Shall Not Be Named, stupid though it may be, so I ain't touching it. My other files, I will back up on a 2GB jump drive - I got it just before I left, so I actually don't think there's anything on it yet.

Of course, I'm in a grumpy mood because the conjunctivitis, which I was ignoring in the hopes that it would go away, has now spread to my right eye.

You know something, though, I'm actually finding my system of non-belief comforting. Because I don't believe in God(s), or in karma, or in fate or destiny or anything other than a general randomness of life and the universe, I'm not sitting here feeling persecuted and baffled. Oh, I whine about it of course, but I do seriously believe I've simply hit a random run of bad luck, and all I can do is wait for it to pass. I don't know, I find that comforting ::shrugs::

ETA: It seems I'm now spreading my bad luck to those closest to me. Mehvash thinks she might be developing pinkeye. After apologizing until I was blue in the face, because she's awesome and has been so helpful and offered to lend me her laptop to write my paper, I decided to skip the NAS thing tomorrow. Yes, I lose money and it's a pain in the ass and I won't get to do it again, but seriously? I'd rather not infect twenty people.

But my computer-fixing journey might be bearing some fruit. After backing up my files this morning, I uninstalled AIM, Firefox (I'm editing this on Explorer, which I hate), iTunes, and DivX. And oddly enough, after that I was able to shut down the computer. I have about half an hour to go in my time test. Maybe it really was one of them, and if it wasn't iTunes then the iPod just happened to crash at an inopportune moment. I'll reinstall them one by one and see if the problems start up again. And I'll probably try the repair Windows function anyway.