My computer hates me…really…
I’ve never felt more like a Point-Counterpoint article in the Onion than last night. See, the keyboard has been acting funky for me and Carla (the space bar needs to be hit really hard to work right). Before I replaced the keyboard, I thought I’d clean it out and see if that made any difference. So, powering down the computer, I unplugged the keyboard and got rid of untold gunk that I’d rather not think about again.
Thus begins my tale of woe….
Apparently, I wasn’t paying attention when I plugged the keyboard back in, and plugged it into the PS/2 connector for the mouse. I have a USB mouse, so that port has never been used, and Windows had to install a driver for the port. Of course I had the wrong kind of device plugged into it, so the driver installation froze about halfway through, and I couldn’t cancel it, so I powered down.
I plugged the keyboard into the right PS/2 port and started the computer up again, expecting to see the blue scandisk screen, and instead was greeted with a blue “registry restore” screen. Once it finished scanning and fixing the registry, Windows booted, and the desktop wallpaper was one I haven’t used in months. My ethernet card had to be re-installed. Panic set in.
Fortunately, all my data were still there. Desktop icons, programs, everything. But now there’s a disonnect between the registry (which I’m assuming was backed up from a previous configuration) and what’s actually installed. The “Add/Remove” programs list has programs that haven’t been installed on this computer in months, and when I try to uninstall them, it says they don’t exist.
So yeah, all is not lost. I was able to re-install the programs that wouldn’t load with the registry “fixed” (mostly Mozilla), and most of it seems to work fine. Of course, now that I’ve fixed it the hard way, I’ve googled some of my problems, and it seems I can just run scanreg/ restore to bring back my “good” registry…AAARRGGGHHH!!!!
I love computers. I really do….
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