Location Taken: Glen Burnie, Maryland
Time Taken: August 2012

So close, and yet so far.

Remember how I mentioned that I was going to kill Windows XP on my computer and replace it with Windows 8 as part of getting rid of corrupt system files that were causing my system to Blue Screen of Death?

Yeeeah, about that…

Let me start at the beginning.

I’ve used Windows XP for a good long time. It’s been a reliable operating system, and well, I never had a reason to upgrade. Especially with a limited budget that makes buying a new operating system kinda out of the picture. And I really am not the type to pirate software, so I just kept using the old stuff.

Well, if you keep using the old stuff for year after year, errors start accumulating. Some bit gets flipped the wrong way and stays that way after the not-entirely-stable system freezes and the like. My system had developed a whole assortment of minor annoyances that I just couldn’t track down. The most annoying was the one where the computer would suddenly lose connection to the internet for no apparent reason, and the only way to fix it was to restart the machine.

The past few months, it’s been getting tougher and tougher to get my computer to restart. Well, the actual “get it running again” part wasn’t so bad. It’s just that the “Restart my Computer” button would only be successful about half the time. Other times it would just stop the shutdown process for no apparent reason. And it was taking longer and longer for the computer to reboot.

And then the Blue Screens of Death started.

It was really irritating at first, because the Blue Screen would flash onto the screen shortly after the computer froze to a halt, and then it would restart a second later. Literally a second, which was far too little time for me to actually, say, read the info on the Blue Screen to, say, figure out why it decided to crash…

Oh, and these Blue Screens weren’t just popping up after I ran the computer for a while. They started to pop up about a tenth of the time when Windows was partway through the booting up process – which is one of those places that any interruption in the process is far more likely to cause lasting problems.

Like, say, your programs deciding to crash suddenly. All of them, suddenly developing more and more errors that cause them to quit. At least Photoshop was kind enough to let me actually finish saving the artwork I posted on Sunday before it completely quit.

And then, I got a Blue Screen that lasted long enough for me to actually read the bloody thing. It said it quite due to a Kernel Data Error. So I looked it up on the internet, which said that it was usually caused by corrupt system files.

Well, I’d been considering buying Windows 8 anyway. Windows XP can’t run a lot of the modern fancy stuff that would make my games run a lot faster and prettier. And they’ll be cutting off supporting XP in a year anyway.

Plus, there’s currently a major sale going on for Windows 8. If you’re upgrading, it only costs $40, or if you want full install disks, it’s $70. That is actually within my budget. Although I decided to spend the extra $30 on the full version just in case something went wrong and I had to reinstall.

This turned out to be an exceedingly wise decision.

I read through a few guides on installing Windows 8 (by the way, Microsoft? A single sheet saying “If you need help go to this website” is NOT a valid substitute for a manual. Some of us actually really like having full instructions in case something goes wrong.) and decided I needed to do a clean install. That means completely wiping the hard drive and starting anew. So I followed the instructions from the guide, and wiped my hard drive (after backing up all my files that I care about on my external hard drive, of course). And sat through an hour and a half long install process.

Only to have it toss an error message at me at the end of that process. I’d forgotten to allocate out the partitions for my newly empty drive. Or maybe I should make that “partition”, since I just use one. I’d assumed that the installation program would be smart enough to figure out that if I just leave it as one object, I’d actually want it to make it into one partition. (By the way, Microsoft? Having the checks to see if the installation is set up correctly being AFTER the installing the files process (which in this case took an hour and a half), and then just saying that the installation failed, end of story, is a dick move. Having that installation failed screen give you literally no options to go back and fix the error (literally the only thing I could do was restart the machine and try again), is a major dick move.)

And actually, it was smart enough to create those partitions, just not smart enough to recognize the fact that it had. When I went to try the reinstall process again there were some nice, properly made partitions in place, so I just left them as they were and reinstalled. It only took half an hour that time, since it didn’t have to delete the old files. Alas, yet another error, at the same spot in the process. I’d forgotten to hit the little “format” buttons for the drives and the remnants of the old installation prevented the current installation from succeeding.

Sigh.

Another reinstall, carefully checking all my partition settings and formatting it, and there, it finally succeeded!

I got into Windows 8!

So thus began the long process of reinstalling all my programs and all that jazz, which was taking a rather long time, longer than I would have expected. Writing it off as a side effect of a new operating system, I installed all my new drivers and the like. And then one of them wanted me to restart, which I merrily did.

Windows restarted quite nicely, well, except for this little label under the load-up screen saying “Automatic Repair” which progressed quickly to “Diagnosing your PC” which lead to a screen saying “Automatic Repair could not fix your computer. Would you like to Shut Down or use the Advanced Options?” I clicked on Advanced Options, which had a “Continue to Windows 8″ button and clicked it.

And the computer restarted.

And I was put back into the Automatic Repair Can’t Do A Thing page. Safe mode reset the computer, too. Windows 8 has some nice features called “Refresh your PC” and “Reset your PC” which reset your settings to the default to get past most bugs. The first one uninstalls your programs but keeps your files, while the second goes for a full cleansing.

Yeah, those didn’t work. Nor did anything I tried. I couldn’t even figure out how to access the system error file it said it created (and that’s with knowing enough DOS commands to work from the command prompt). All it would do is present me with a long list of options that either just reset the process or didn’t work at all. (By the way, Microsoft? More feedback on those screens would be REEEALLLY nice. Just telling me that the process failed is not at all useful.)

After hunting up info on the internet, I figured out that the only way to get out of the infinite loop was to reinstall Windows 8.

Again.

So it was back into the install screen (already eternally glad I’d purchased the disk rather than downloading it) yet another time. Using my hard-earned knowledge, I wiped the old installation off the disk, properly partitioned and formatted the disk – oh wait, what are you saying, why can’t you format the disk. At least you gave me an error code to look up.

My SATA cable connecting the hard drive and the motherboard is bad, you say. Siigh.

I shut down everything, let the computer sit and cool down, then opened up the case. Now, one thing you should know is that I built this computer myself. I actually know what each part does, and more importantly in this case, I know what a SATA cable looks like. And I had a spare, thank the heavens. One quick swap out, and everything was ready to go.

Of course, I had to start the install process over again from the start. Please note that every time I went to install I had to enter the 25-digit Product Key. This was the fifth time that day I’d done so, and I practically had it memorized. So back to checking everything was set up properly and grabbing my book to sit through another half-hour of installation.

Hey, look at that, it’s actually moving quickly, maybe that SATA cable really was going bad!

It only took five minutes to install that time. A nice drop down from the ninety minutes it took the first time, if I say so myself.

And Windows 8 was up and running, much faster than before!

Time to re-reinstall everything and re-personalize and all that jazz. (By the way, Microsoft? Your personalization options are a wee bit… minimal. Fix that, seriously. Changing a single color does not a personalized computer make.) I got my stuff reinstalled, including Guild Wars 2 (I was jonesing for that game at that point, and besides, it let me test out how well my system was behaving in some of those mass battles you can get into). It was performing great, and I was even starting to tame the new start menu (step one: unpin 90% of their apps, since I’ll never use them. Step two: look through the rest to see which ones I like – ooo, sticky notes!). And then during a lovely battle against a Champion level enemy in the depths of the Cursed Shores – the game froze.

I restarted and got back in (alas, the boss was dead and I didn’t get any loot from it), continued on – and had to drop my graphics settings to minimal to do the next big battle. Which we won, at least! The Path to Arah was open! And I got treasure that time!

I signed off to hunt up possible reasons, and found out that my graphics driver was having issues. Now, the problems I had in XP that tipped it over the edge started a little after I’d updated the driver there, so maybe it was a buggy driver. So I reinstalled all that (which was a struggle that took far longer than it should have, but it was late at night and I was getting rather tired by the time I tamed that, so I don’t fully recall everything I did), and hoped everything was settled.

And it was. For a day.

Then, again in Guild Wars 2, (admittedly, that was the most processing-heavy thing I was doing, since it’s all online and I was a bit too unsure if things were stable to do anything that wasn’t automatically saved on a different machine) wandering towards a poor innocent Rabbit with murder on my mind (yay Kill Variety rewards), I got a Blue Screen of Death.

This one said “Critical Process Died”. Never a happy thing to read.

Ah well, reload and hope for the best. Wait, why is everything slowing to a standstill periodically? Why the heck is Task Manager saying I’m using all of my disk?! I’m just looking at websites! It’s the Windows programs that are hogging it all anyway, according to the Task Manager! (By the way, Microsoft? The new Task Manager is AWESOME! I wish that level of feedback was available everywhere, and it’s really user friendly too. Do more stuff like that.)

Hmm… Maybe the SATA port went bad too. That happens a lot when a cable goes bad, right? At the very least changing that will let me make sure it’s plugged in fully…

Darn it, you’re still doing it, aren’t you. And look, there’s another Blue Screen of Death. And oh look, there’s another, partway through the start up process.

Wait just a second… That’s exactly what was going wrong in XP.

Which, alas, means some of the hardware is going bad. Probably the hard drive, though possibly the motherboard.

Which means I ordered enough new computer parts to essentially replace my entire computer. At least I can provide all the labor myself, and I found some REALLY nice sales on parts, so I’m getting a major upgrade for only a few hundred bucks.

Well, technically, I could have just tried replacing the hard drive. Except I’ve been drooling over Solid State Drives (they’re a lot faster than the standard Hard Disk Drives, and they don’t make irritating whirring noises), and decided I had to get one of those. Which meant I really did need to replace my motherboard (the part that connects all the rest of the pieces of the computer), since it was too old to really use those well. Which meant I needed to replace my Processor, since my old one will literally not work in modern motherboards (the socket that top of the line processors fit into on the motherboard changes every few years as advances are made). And the Memory I have uses the old DDR2 system, which doesn’t work with the new DDR3 system, and it’s really expensive to get the more obsolete motherboards since few people still offer them anymore, so that had to get replaced too…

The parts should come in sometime this week. Current prediction is this Friday at the earliest, but I might be lucky. One package is in Martinsburg, West Virginia (about 65 miles away) and the other is in Merrifield, Virginia (about 30 miles away). Hopefully it won’t take them a full week to go that distance. I know distances are odd for hub-based transportation, but still…

Ah well, cross my fingers and hope they come soon. And hope this sixth reinstallation goes without this hitch. Darn it, need more fingers to cross.

(By the way, the image? It’s a bad pun. I took that photo when our old van was totaled this fall. It is literally a picture of a Broken Window. And yes, more than just this one window was broken.)