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If you have noticed a gap between this post and my most recent one, there is a good reason for it. Apparantly my computer has been infected with some sort of virus and it has been inoperable for the past week or so.

Here is what happened:

I turned my computer on just like I do every morning, but that particular morning it decided that it wanted to check my disks. After it checked my disks it rebooted. After that initial windows screen with the scrolling squares underneath, the screen went black for about five seconds. Then an error message came up stating that file “ole32.dll” was missing so that it could not start winlogon.exe. Then it gave me the same error message for file lsass.exe. I clicked ok on each of them and the screen just went blank. If you waited long enough it would go to the desktop but nothing would come up. Lame. I tried to restart in safe mode, but no luck. I also tried to restart with the last known good configuration, but that did not work either. It was at this point that I decided that I needed to reinstall Windows XP.

Today was the day that I was to embark on my mission to reinstall Windows XP. The first store that I visited today was the local Best Buy. They were all out there, and the sales associate wasn’t even sure if they were going to keep selling it. Then, I went to the Target next door, and they were all out as well. The sales associate there told me that they would probably be out for a few more days, but the Target about ten miles north of us had two copies in stock.

I left the shopping center on a journey to find the next Target. On my way there I noticed  an Office Depot off the freeway. I thought about it for about two seconds and then darted onto the off-ramp. When I got to the Office Depot, I was immediately greeted by a friendly staff member. I told him that I needed a copy of XP. He brought me over to where they sold their operating systems. I initially went for the $99.99 version, but it turns out that this is the version that you use when you are upgrading from Windows 98 or Windows 2000.  Since this wasn’t the case I went with the standard $184.99 + state and local taxes version. This was the real deal full installation I was told. At this point I was too frusturated to buy the “upgrade” version, take it home and find out it was the wrong version, and then take it back only to find out I couldn’t return it because I had already opened it. I decided to just bite the bullet and get the “Full Meal Deal.” Yes, supersize it.

Now we are current and I am in the process of repairing Windows. It attempted to do the repair about a half an hour ago, but it restarted after 3% completion for some random reason. I did not see why because I was doing laundry in the meantime. I told the setup disk to repair once again, and now we are sitting nicely at 16% in the “h” section of the files. At this rate it should only take another hour. I spoke too soon, it decided to restart again…lovely.
So if I already had XP on my computer, why did I go out and buy a new install disk you might ask. Well…I built this computer myself a year or so ago. This would make me the tech support for when things go wrong. At the time I thought that I could just install windows from the reinstall cd that came with my Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop. It turns out that it doesn’t quite work like that. Luckily my roommate at the time had a copy of Windows that I could use, and I have used that copy since. Now that I need to reinstall, I don’t have that copy and I was forced to purchace a legitimate version.

Now nothing seems to be working. Hopefully I can figure out this mess and keep all of my old files as well.