I guess I should have known when I got to work without my keys - had to wait to be let into the office by a co-worker. However, I thought I'd make up time, because the laptop was only in sleep mode last night - no need for the long and occasionally laborious wait for it to boot, find the network and sort out downloading my ballooning profile. No way. It started fine, opened Outlook, and then stopped dead.
Despite all the IT support jokes, very often the best way of dealing with this sort of thing really is to reboot, which I dutifully did. And the machine hung again. And then a third time.
Now it may have just been coincidence, but it was only yesterday that I wiped my previous system, which had a vanilla XP install with no software now. Who says computers don't have a sense of humour?
So I was simultaneously trying to pull together enough software to make the desktop system usable, while going through all the repair steps I could to get the laptop back to life, and still handling internal and external support questions. Nothing worked on the laptop until I went for the full reinstall. Dell reinstallation CDs are good, but apparently not good enough. I was left without drivers for half the hardware, and of course most of the software I'd spent the last week carefully collecting and installing had gone. Definitely downhill.
Suffice it to say that it's just about back together now. And it looks as though it may have been prophetic. I'm trying to look on it as a dry run, getting up to speed for rebuilding the home desktop, because the bad news is that this latter system is now showing signs of imminent failure. It's just been one of those days.
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