When in doubt, read the manual.

Srsly.

So today I took my laptop into the college’s IT department for the seemingly simple task of connecting it to the internet. 2 hours later they reported that it was BSODing on startup and produced the welcome phrase, “…do you have a Recovery disk?” and showed little remorse as they informed me that I’d lose all my data, and that there was obviously a hard disk error that caused it to BSOD after they installed their own virus killer. Ya. I countered this with the fact that it had never showed any sign of hard disk instability in the 4 months I had it, and that it’s a young computer, and they continued to dismiss it as my problem, hardware failure. As an afterthought, they said they could back it up, and sighed dramatically and said no when I asked whether they’d be able to back it up today. As someone with at least half a clue, I decided to cut out the middle-monkey and back it up myself. After backing it up using Bart PE and the hard drive of Neville the recently harvested laptop attached via IDE to USB cable, running chkdsc remotely and all that jazz, I read the manual.

Did you know that if you start Vista while holding F8 down, it opens a dialogue box with the option “repair your computer?”, which not only restores your computer to the time just before it went wrong (in this case after they took of AVG virus killer and before they put on McAfee VirusScan), it also checks Microsoft.com for the reason, giving me this treasure of a screenshot…

Vista McAfee Message

Hard drive failure. Yeah. Nothing to do with the software. Totally.

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