Computational Catastrophe

My ancient laptop reached a new low today, which I didn't think possible. I brought it in to the lab to piece together a network map in Multimedia Fusion (a fantastic program), and had it connected up to one of the monitors there as its own monitor was broken. It was quite impressive actually, being surrounded by three monitors - one gapingly blank, one running Linux and the other trying to make the best of things with Win 98. That wasn't to last long, however, as the laptop suddenly gave me one of those terrifying white error messages. Now, those are the worst kind - they're far more deadly than the standard Illegal Operations that versions of Windows before XP were so fond of reporting, and while they aren't quite as fatal to the computer as blue screens were, they appear far less often and are therefore all the more terrifying.

"HowqztNJ lt'k wodrm'f", this one proclaimed. I closed my eyes and looked again, hoping that I hadn't just forgotten how to read. It was still there - an error message that my computer had decided to give to me in Klingon. I can't remember the text of it exactly, but to get an error like that requires practice. Clicking OK crashed the system irreparably, so I rebooted it to be told that it couldn't find its operating system.

That seemed like slightly bad news, so I decided to go in to the BIOS setup (nervously skipping past a threatening-looking red window that warned the hard disk controller had failed) and attempt to fix it. Noticing that the computer had suddenly decided it had an 8GB hard drive, which would be nice but is certainly not the case, I corrected it manually and rebooted again, whereupon, suddenly, nothing happened.

By this time Iain had come over as well and we went through several cycles of trying different obscure options before finally looking in the obvious place - the hard drive itself. Now, I didn't know my hard drive was so accessible - it turns out it just sort of slides out the side of the machine. I'd never even thought that bit was the hard disk, as my CS expertise (and indeed common sense) told me that it would be buried somewhere deep inside the machine where meddling hands can't get to it.

It turned out that the hard drive had fallen out. It hadn't even quite fallen out, it was sort of wedged in place, not quite fully inside the case of the laptop. All attempts at realigning it failed, so we had to pull it out by force, with me holding the laptop and Iain tugging on the exposed hard disk. To all onlookers it must have looked like we were pulling a large grey Christmas cracker. And indeed, with a large crack sound, it came free. It was then that we noticed the catches that should have been undone before attempting to move it. Against all odds, though, once reassembled it worked fine, and mysteriously the monitor has suddenly started working again.

In sadder news, though, they killed Prince of Persia. :( (I'm not one to say it's terrible just because it's new, but... I mean, look at it.)