A man enters a bar and orders a drink. The bar has a robot bartender. The robot serves him a perfectly prepared cocktail, and then asks him, “What’s your IQ?” The man replies “150″ and the robot proceeds to make conversation about global warming factors, quantum physics and spirituality, environmental interconnectedness, string theory, nano-technology. The customer is very impressed and thinks, “This is really cool.” He decides to test the robot. He walks out of the bar, turns around, and comes back in for another drink. Again, the robot serves him the perfectly prepared drink and asks him, “What’s your IQ?” The man responds, “about a 100.” Immediately the robot starts talking, but this time, about football, NASCAR, baseball, cars, beer, guns, and breasts. Really impressed, the man leaves the bar and decides to give the robot one more test. He heads out and returns, the robot serves him and asks, “What’s your IQ?” The man replies, “Er, 50, I think.” And the robot says… real slowly… “So……..is…….your…..
party…gonna….nominate……….Hillary…. ??”

I wouldn’t call myself a computer wiz. Hell I am just a step above “knows enough to be dangerous” but I have been messing with true PC’s since 1993. In that time I have seen computers do strange things and have seen some pretty wierd errors. My most recent error has to be up there in the top 10. Mind you I have had several problems come up lately. I think there is still a problem and my lower level of knowledge tells me that it is the mother board dieing a horrible death. It isn’t even that old but hey, it is an electronic device.

Recently I have been getting the dreaded BSOD. For most long time Windows users, you already know what that means. For those of you who don’t it stands for Blue Screen of Death. In layman’s terms it means something really bad has happened to your computer. It is going to cost you money and or much frustration fixing the problem. You might even loose some files you had on your hard drive not to mention some hair you had on your head.  The BSOD started after I had done two things around the same time. Installed a new updated driver for my LTB headset and did a Windows recommended update. Within a couple of hours the BSOD problem started. I quickly restored to a point three days prior to installing either update…. problem continued. After a few days of frustration I ended up removing my LTB headset and the associated program completely. Problem seemed to have gone away. Several days passed with no BSOD.

I then decided to reinstall my LTB headset but this time stay with the software/driver that came with it on the CD. I had run for over a year with that driver and with no problems. All good for two days. I normally leave my computer on all the time but log off Windows when I am not using it. I did this the other day when leaving for work. When I came home I noticed that the Windows Logo that bounces around the screen when logged off was frozen. Rut Ro! What the hell happened now? Completely locked out I decided to press the “Save my ass button” Reset. When the BIOS was doing it’s thing it came to the DMI Pool Data portion and stopped with these hateful words: “ERROR LOADING OS”.  It was time to call upon a higher source for help. The concensus was: Corrupted OS meaing Windows XP was HOSED.

Upon hearing this I decided that before I reformat my C drive I wanted to check everything I could to prevent loosing stuff. I ran the Maxtor Disc Checker program and it said HD was fine. I checked all my connections and the memory. All fine. I then took the C drive out and put it into another XP machine as a slave drive to run chkdsk. Results: Fine. I then defragmented the drive and put it back into my PC to try again. ERROR LOADING OS…. DAMN! Ok it was time to whip out the XP CD, reformat C and reinstall Windows XP. With a shakey hand I placed the CD in the CDROM drive, closed the drawer and pressed the reset button. Luckily there was yet another problem. Seems the machine decided it would not boot off the CD, even though it said it would, for the Mother board was not seeing the CD Drive. Strange yet again but good thing for it prompted me to poke around in BIOS and see what was up. While in there I noticed the entire problem as to why it was not finding my OS. Somehow while the PC was logged off during that day it had decided to change the priority order in which it looked at my drives. It now said to look to my SATA drive, which is my second drive, first then to the primary drive. How in blue blazes did that get changed? I reset it to the proper order of things and saved. Wha-la the machine came right up. I was so happy I logged into WoW to see if that was working. After telling the guys it was fixed and running around a bit it started to stutter. Not good … then BSOD back. OMG!! Can I ever win or what?

I guess maybe it is indeed time to reformat the C drive and start over even though I think my mother board is dieing as I stated earlier. Why put it off any longer. I just hope I don’t have to write about this particular subject anymore … at least for another year or so!!