Crap. Crap. Crap.

[apollinav]

Click the cut if you have any interest in hearing my Microsoft rant.

Sufficed to say I'm out of commission for awhile-ish.

This morning I powered up the laptop to discover it wasn't happening.  I called tech support, and after explaining several times I wasn't going to pay to extend my warranty, as my laptop was still under the original warrenty, and could we please get to the part where we fixed my laptop, I actually got connected to Tech Support.  I had fears based upon an error message that my harddrive took a nose dive.  And I wasn't getting initialization beeps.

So we did a system scan and discovered that it was VISTA that took the nose dive.  Apparently VISTA is a piece of crap.  No shit.

Long story short, I had to restore my laptop to the original factory settings.

Fuck.

I now have to find my Office Suite cd and install that.  No problem. 

But I've lost all my files.  Some of them I have backed up on a geekstick.  Some of them are loaded on googledocs.

Most are gone. 

It won't hold up the next chapter of TGC, but it's still 'not good.'  And the WIP I had nearly 10,000 words written for to post after TGC... gone too.  And it was a dandy fic.

I need chocolate now.  Does chocolate and margaritas go together?  

Oh, and I forgot to mention.  The A/C died last night.  The compressor died, and that could be seriously expensive.  I have fans blowing everywhere just to keep things marginally inhabitable.  I have no idea where I'm miraculously going to pull the money for a new A/C compressor out of, but I'm still more bothered about losing my work.  I could sit in a hot-box of a house and be miserable and sweating as long as I have my fics back.

Comments

[severewrath.livejournal.com]

Wow. Dell Tech Support is terrible: I'm sorry.

It should have been possible, easily, to get your files off. Booting into Safe Mode should have done it. If you couldn't boot into Safe Mode, then restoring to factory settings wouldn't fix the problem (it would almost certain re-occur).

Actually, it's conceivably possible that you can still recover the files. I'd recommend reading this:

http://www.tech-pro.net/how-to-data-recovery.html

There's a lot of Vista hate here, but honestly XP's more likely to fuck up than Vista. I don't really want to enumerate the reasons why... but I would suspect that Dell Tech Support told you it was a Vista problem because they didn't want to have to deal with the alternative (a hardware problem, which they're liable for). It's really, really, really hard to fuck up a Vista install to the point where it won't boot.

[apollinav.livejournal.com]

Wow. I really had no idea. I took them at face value from what they had said. I'll look into the article.

Thank you for enlightening me.