Minor scare
Traumatic…
I just tried to reinstall my scanner (an old Canon n1220U) as I have been lazy to do so ever since I upgraded my PC. Canon Europe’s website turned up no Vista drivers, so in my infinite wisdom I decided to give the XP drivers a shot. They downloaded and installed flawlessly. I fired up Photoshop for a test scanm and after a minute or so of “initial calibration”, the entire driver crashed. Vista then helpfully shut off my scanner, and it wouldn’t auto-detect for some reason despite my unplugging and replugging it in.
So, a reboot.
The damn machine refused to POST. No RAM count, no BIOS logo, nothing.
Deep breath.
Power cycling didn’t help.
More deep breaths. The rational side of me advised that it was most likely something to do with my unstable overclocking config, and that Windows had no hand in my PC’s refusal to wake up. Coincidence. Coincidence. The other half of my brain wasn’t being too helpful - “but what if it does? You never know… it’s Vista after all, with it’s inexplicable ways. MAYBE THIS THING WILL NEVER WAKE UP!!!”
I power cycled everything.
5 minutes later, success! - but wait - what’s this? BSODOMGWTFBBQ!!!!
I stared at the thing in disbelief, its cheery, friendly nature apparent in its constant BSOD-reboot cycle. The crash was so fast I didn’t even have time to glimpse the error code, but 3 cycles later, I somehow managed to boot into safe mode… and through the life-saving miracle of System Restore (Microsoft may be evil, but fuck you - it has System Restore.) I managed to bring everything back up in 10 minutes.
fin.
P.S. I love System Restore.
This comes to mind.
Uncle Bill: “Remember Peter, with great geekiness… come great shitiness. Always remember that, Peter.