CRASH!!

It wasn't pretty...my computer crashed!

Woke up Sunday morning. Nothing out of the ordinary, did the usual stuff. Put on a pot of coffee, turned on the computer, headed to the shower while the computer fired up. I came out of the bathroom to discover an ugly sight..."no operating system found".

I spent the next few hours trying to get the computer to function, no response. I feared this day was coming. When I bought this notebook the guy at the store loaded an unregistered copy of Windows XP in English in it for me. Remember, I am in a Chinese speaking country and computers are sold here with Chinese as the primary language. As part of the sale, he agreed to load up an English operating system for me. The problem is the copy he had was illegal. This means that I wasn't able to update my system and it made me very vulnerable to all kinds of bugs and glitches. After running this bootleg version for about a year, it went kaput.

I thought I figured out what to do Sunday afternoon. I headed out to Guangwha market, the greatest electronics market on Earth, and bought a legal version of Windows XP. Came home and loaded it up...no response. I just spent about $120 for nothing!...dern it.

Monday morning I went back to the place I bought the computer and explained my predicament. The tech guy was very cool. He gave me taxi fare and pointed me in the direction of the repair shop. I got to the repair shop and waited for about 20 minutes to talk to a technician. The were very accommodating and told me it would be fixed that afternoon and I could pick it up the next day free of charge. They were going to give me a new, legal version of XP and a new hard drive. This is great except I lost everything I had saved...about 20 gigs worth of stuff! I had saved most of my work files and pictures to CD, thank god. Still, this is a serious bummer.

The repair shop was true to their word. I picked up the computer early Tuesday afternoon. It's running like a well-oiled machine, minus all my files.

One issue I am less-than-thrilled about is the fact that my virus software and my copy of Microsoft Office are no longer valid because they were exclusive to that hard drive/operating system. Two expensive pieces of software rendered useless by the crash.

I guess I should be glad to have this machine back in working order. I can resume wasting countless hours on the internet...lol.