NP: John Cage, 4'33"

You may recall all my whinging about my computer, and the robot uprising, and how I got a machine that was more or less rebuilt from the inside out. Given the lack of bitching about it, you have have also thought everything with said machine was both hunky and dory.

You would be wrong.

The most persistently annoying thing has been that I can't play any kind of audio, through any kind of media player. This makes me think that my audio codecs somehow got fried, since it's not tied to either a program or an audio device. Then I got panicked that the frying of said codecs might have been the result of some piece of malware that was lurking in a file I had downloaded, and that I had brought this all on myself. Mostly because Avast! was getting tripped up on what appears to be an older version of the standard uninstaller file, and then because either System Mechanic or ZoneAlarm Anti-Spyware insisted on calling third-party ad cookies "spyware infections."

And while I was going through the System Mechanic paces to try to tune up what had quickly become a sluggish machine, I started getting spontaneous reboots, which would then turn up a "Windows has recovered from a serious error" message. A bit of investigation pointed to the paging file, so I tried the workaround offered up by Microsoft.

Now my machine won't boot. At all. This is doubly irritating because, since I got it back, I get no video during the pre-Windows startup sequence. Which means I never see screens like "press any key to boot from CD" or "you screwed up last time, so we recommend you start in Safe Mode." It probably even means I can't boot to the restore CD that I got with it.

So it would seem that Microsoft is working on the side of the robots. Be warned.