Everything In Between

My girlfriend owns a $2,000+ Sony Vaio laptop computer bought directly from Sony with a two-year warranty. For precisely two years and one month it worked without a problem. She kept it (mostly) updated with Windows Update, downloaded new virus defs regularly and kept it pretty clean.

Then one day, as she was showing a friend some photos she ran Windows Update in the background. When Windows Update had finished, it requested a restart. Normal enough….

But Windows XP never finished loading. After 10 minutes, it was still running that ugly green progress bar across the screen. So we did a hard reset and waited. BIOS starts, and suddenly we get our message from hell: “Windows did not start up properly on its last attempt. Revert to the last known good configuration. We are sorry for the inconvenience” or something like that. Fine, we can be good Micro$oft $uckers and follow directions.

No good, it hangs at the progress bar again. Okay, hard-reset, error message, this time we try normal mode. No good, okay, hard-reset, error message, let’s try safe mode. No good, okay, hard-reset, error message, let’s try command prompt.