A weekend in the life of the awesomeness that is me

So how’d you spend your weekend Linc? I’m glad you asked me that!

Let’s start with Day 1:

My state FINALLY allows us to get our defensive driving certificate online rather than put up with the agony of attending a 6 hour course with a bunch of other dweeb nozzles looking to reduce their insurance costs, or because they drove through 5 red lights on their way to OTB while kicking back a Bud Light like the real men of genius that they are. The worst thing about these “courses” is the instructor telling us with a straight face what a traffic signal does, and that red actually does mean you have to stop. Oh, and of course the ever so popular “Let’s all go around the room and introduce ourselves and explain why we’re there” routine. I hate that crap. Just give me my toilet paper of a defensive driving certificate and let me be on my way, please.

I found the cheapest internet course and immediately signed up, only to realize yet again why New York continues to suck dangling donkey balls. Because you see, I’m required to do 6 hours, whether it’s online or offline, and the presentation I have to do is timed so you can’t fast forward to get to the end and do a quiz or whatnot to finish the course. Either way, I still have to waste 6 hours of my life. And just to make sure I’m not AWOL and swapping with a buddy while the presentation moves along, popup messages randomly appear that demands you call an 800 number and repeat a series of numbers which they use for voice identification purposes so they know you’re still you. All this to save $10 a month on my insurance? Yeah, I won’t be doing this again.

So that was Day 1. Enter Day 2:

I took a nice drive around and eventually found a roadside diner that had free wifi, so I dropped in and broke out my laptop while chowing down on a Texan grilled cheese sammich. The atmosphere was nice, you could see the sunset in the distance, and I’m feeling pretty good about things. My laptop boots up and…

Blue Screen of Death.

I spent the next 30 minutes rebooting and ultimately failing to log into Windows, and dreading the thought that my laptop of almost 6 years had finally bit it. I needed it to last just a few more months too until I could replace it with a MacBook Pro.

I wasn’t ready to toss in the towel just yet, so when I got home I went to work on it. I was still able to boot into safe mode, so I tried disabling drivers and a few other tricks, all to no avail. Finally I decided to look at what’s called a dump file for clues as to what caused the crash. A dump file gets created when you log back onto Windows after your PC flashes the blue screen of death on you. I found it but couldn’t even read it, so I started googling for more info. Apparently I needed a debugging tool to analyze it, so I downloaded it, clicked the file to install, and…

“The system administrator has set policies to prevent this installation.”

This, despite the fact that I WAS the @#$%ing system administrator, and was logged in as such. I tried to install it again. No dice. So I googled some more, and tried a few registry hacks to make it stop giving me that message, and of course none of them worked. So I switched gears and installed the debugging tool on my desktop instead, then used my thumbdrive to download the dump file and upload it to my desktop.

Now it came to learning how to actually use this tool. I had no idea what to do with it, so I googled some more, and finally came across a series of instructions to help me weed out the relevant info from the dump file. It goes like this:

1. Open a command prompt (Start -> Run -> “cmd”)
2. cd \program files\debugging tools (Or wherever they are installed to)
3. kd -z C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini???????-??.dmp
4. kd> .logopen c:\debuglog.txt
5. kd> .sympath srv*c:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols
6. kd> .reload;!analyze -v;r;kv;lmnt;.logclose;q
7. You now have a debuglog.txt in c:\, open it in a text edit (Notepad?).

I don’t think landing the Space Shuttle could be this complicated. Nevertheless, I followed the instructions carefully and was finally able to nail down the file name that my laptop choked on, a file called vsdatant.sys. I googled it and it was a file that belonged to ZoneAlarm, a firewall software that I had running on my system, though I hadn’t updated it in a while. So I uninstalled it, rebooted, and Windows finally came back up again!

Yaaaaaaaaaaaay, I had saved my lappie-top!!!

I immediately started updating all my software, installed Service Pack 3 for WinXP, and rebooted several times to make sure the problem was truly gone. By this time it was after 4AM, so I patted myself on the back for a job well done, and went to bed. Woke up the next morning, feeling refreshed and happy, then booted up my laptop.

Blue Screen of Death.

At this point I’m pretty convinced now it’s hardware related, most likely the memory. In one desperate last move, I raced down to the computer store to buy the only memory they had in stock compatible with my laptop, then raced back to swap my memory. I was pretty sure this would do it. It had to be the memory, right? It’s the only way my poor lappie could still be saved.

Blue Screen of Death.

Sigh. I finally thought, @#$% it, and formatted the drive. I nuked everything and installed WinXP completely from scratch, and that my friends, is what finally resolved the issue. I only had to lose everything that was on my laptop to get it done too, though fortunately, I had copies of all my files on my desktop as well, so no big loss. But thank you so much, Microsoft, for designing the most cryptically ridiculous non-intuitive OS in creation. May you all rot in San Francisco.

I couldn’t stay mad though, I was happy enough to get my laptop back and running even better than before. I was planning to go on vacation next month and I would have felt naked not having it with me so I could blog on the road.

After the laptop saga finally ended, I ran some errands and came back home late in the evening, satisfied in the knowledge that despite the fact that I got no rest whatsoever, I did get a lot accomplished. I get my mail and my happy karma is ruined once again by a disturbing letter that will be the subject of my next blog post. Nothing alarming really, just a quick note to let me know my personal info and social security number had been stolen and that I would imminently become a victim of identity theft and fraud. No biggie.

So how was your weekend?

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