computer OK

I finally resurrected my computer. It was a harrowing ordeal, but I finally did it. I tried writing up the story while my computer still didn't work, but I got the details jumbled. I did a lot of other writing as well, but I'll save that for later. In my last post I started on what was going wrong with my computer. I tried a little known tool called driver verifier to try to see if I could find out the cause of the blue screens. It turned out to be a remaining Iomega driver. Apparently, installing an old skool Iomega parallel port ZIP drive to a Windows XP computer is a bad idea. I did do an uninstall, but like most other software manufacturers' uninstalls it was far from thorough. I could only boot in safe mode as the Iomega driver gave me a blue screen at boot. I then did something stupid, I deleted the driver without getting rid of registry entries. After doing that, I couldn't boot at all. I think it was at that time, I did the complete hardware diagnostics that came with my computer which found nothing wrong. I attempted to do a repair using a Windows XP CD. That failed - it said it couldn't find asms while looking in systemroot/device/cdrom0/i386. I knew there was nothing wrong with the CD by the way as I had just opened the envelope it was in for the first time to do the repair. I then tried to do a reinstall over top the current OS - but not before finding a way to get to a command prompt to backup my files to my other hard drive. The reinstall was semi-successful although it said it had trouble copying a file - I told it to retry and it worked, but I was still getting blue screens and applications were crashing randomly. I figured I had only one last resort, which actually at that point could never had worked anyway because if I was getting crashes from a reinstall it was most likely a hardware problem. I burned stuff to disc and copied the rest to my other hard drive. I used the image of the system partition that came with my computer on the hard drive to restore the system. Even after doing that, I still got blue screens. I ended up wiping out all the partitions on the hard drive that came with this computer and starting all over, but this time, the install would say that a file was not copied successfully. I'd tell it to retry and then it would go through, but it would give the same message about the next file. The next time I ran the hardware diagnostic, I found out one of the memory sticks went bad. I don't see where along the lines it went bad or why the repair would have failed. (to all you anti-M$ zealots : this occurrence is an anomaly - I'm not switching OSes because of it. Bah, I can't believe Blogger spell check doesn't think zealots is a word, but it thinks zealot is.)

I wonder how not having a computer to use for those three weeks or so has effected me. More on that later.