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After the CrashOctober 11, 2008 No, it's not about the economy, stupid -- Morgana V had a nervous breakdown Thursday night. I returned home from the barn, fed Travvy, and checked the computer. Uh-oh. Morgana displayed a DOS-like screen that said Windows couldn't load because c:\windows\system32\config\system was corrupt. I could load the setup disk, hit "r" for repair, and see if that worked. It didn't. Most nervous breakdowns don't come out of the blue. Neither did this one. For about two weeks Windows had been crashing on a regular irregular basis. If there was a pattern, I couldn't figure it out. Sometimes it happened during an antivirus scan. Sometimes it didn't. Often it happened when I was working in Word -- but I'm often working in Word, so I couldn't blame Word for the crashes. Sometimes the error messages pointed toward a malfunctioning RAM, other times they thought it had to be new software or hardware I'd installed (I hadn't installed any). Toward the end of last week I called Gateway tech support. The techie told me to reinstall Windows. She didn't mention that this would wipe my hard drive, but I knew it already: several years ago -- literally the night before I was moving from Edgartown back to Vineyard Haven -- I reinstalled Windows on the advice of a tech support person. As it turned out, the problem wasn't with the operating system: I didn't need to reinstall Windows. What can I say? It was late at night, I was on the verge of moving; I wasn't thinking all that clearly. I spent the next four weeks trying to persuade various robots at Symantec that I really had updated my Norton antivirus subscription two months before and would they please tell their %&#$ server to let me update my AV software? I finally gave up and switched to AVG. Call it denial or call it the search for alternatives, but I wasn't ready to reinstall Windows until I'd checked out a few other possibilities. Because of the crashes I'd been saving my work more often than usual and backing it up more regularly. (Under ordinary circumstances I'm not exactly lackadaisical, but you wouldn't call me zealous either.) For almost a year I've been thinking of signing up with an online backup service. Have I done it? No. For longer than that I'd been thinking that an external hard drive would be a good idea. Earlier this week I finally bought one, along with a 10-pack of read/write CD-ROMs. Had I installed it yet? I had not. But aha! Once I bit the bullet, it turned out that the big dark cloud had a silver lining (mix metaphors, moi? Never!): Windows XP was willing to back all my C:\ drive files into one giant backup folder that wouldn't be wiped by the reinstall. Wow. A gift from cyberheaven! Sure, do it, said I. It didn't make the aftermath of the reinstall exactly painless, but it sure made it easier. All my current data files and folders were back in place within minutes, except one: my Outlook Express folders, which are many and well packed with stuff. This was, however, my glitch: I had two incomprehensibly named folders with the same name -- the name was {48A71D91-AEA7-4031-8448-5B0899D97FDF}; see what I mean? -- and a slip of the finger disappeared the one that had all my stuff in it. Not too much harm done, though, because I had the same incomprehensibly named folder backed up on CD. It was a week old, so I lost a few days' worth of current e-mail. Could've been worse, lots worse. Still, I could tell it was gonna be a three-beer night. I only had two bottles in the fridge, so I put a third in the freezer and got to work reinstalling the drivers and associated software for my printer, scanner, and (don't laugh) Zip drive, then Word, WordPerfect, Quicken, and AVG antivirus. My AVG Internet Security .exe file was current when I upgraded at the beginning of August, but it's been updated almost daily since then and to restore the updates I had to be online. I wasn't. I love my little apartment, and most of the time I like living on Martha's Vineyard, but sitting in my little apartment on Martha's Vineyard in the (almost) middle of the night, halfway through my second beer and with no connection to the Internet, I had an existential spiritual crisis. Imagine Superman sapped of his powers by kryptonite. Imagine a Darkovan telepath locked into her own head. (OK, maybe I read too many comic books in my youth, and too many fantasy novels in my adulthood.) For a few angst-ridden minutes I didn't dare proceed for fear that the process would not work and I'd be locked out of the virtual world forever. I took a deep breath and pulled the driver for my wireless adapter off the shelf. The guy who got me connected to my neighbor/landlords' wireless network was subsequently busted for sexually harassing his clients, and subsequent to that he committed suicide. In other words, if I couldn't retrace his steps on my own, he wasn't available to bail me out. I loaded the software, plugged the adapter into its USB port . . . Good news: its little green light started flickering. Even better news: I loaded Internet Explorer and it went straight to my Google home page. Better news yet: I'd written down most of the settings for my outgoing and incoming e-mail servers, and what I hadn't written down I remembered. The kryptonite was gone, my telepathic powers returned: I was back online. Time for that third beer. The third beer had been in the freezer long enough to progress past beer daiquiri stage. It was well on the way to ice, which is to say I had to warm the bottle with my hands before anything would come out the neck. What did finally come out was flat flat flat. What the hell: it was two thirty in the a.m. and I didn't care. Morgana V was back in business, and I was online. I drank the beer and went to bed.
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