4, 8, 15, 16, 23, & 42

I feel like John Locke from Lost in a way.  I have to keep clicking the button on the computer every four hours to postpone, and if I don’t postpone it my computer will die.  It’s true.  Let me tell you the story.

I got back from vacation on Monday, and found my computer not working.  It’s a Vista machine, and it’s under two years old.  It wouldn’t boot past the loading screen.

So I restart the computer, thinking it was just a glitch, but it fails.

I try to run in last-best configuration, it fails.

I try to run in Network-Only Safe-Mode, it fails.

I try to run in Safe-Mode, it fails.

So that is the entire list.  I unplug everything, try to recover from DVD, it all fails or glitches.  I run several checkdisks and that sort of thing, and the computer doesn’t respond.

Finally, after trying to recover from DVD for the ninth time, it works.  Randomly.  My computer glitches out, displaying random coloured RGB pixels across the entire screen making my monitor look like it had dead pixels, then it restart and started working.

I traced the problem back to an automatic update of the OS by Vista.  The way this works (which is set to be “on” by default) is that the computer gives you a few minutes to hit the “postpone” button on the automatic update or it will restart the computer and start the upgrade.  Your only options are to postpone it for a few minutes or a few hours, and there is no option above 4 hours.  So the minute I wasn’t at the computer, my computer decided to automatic upgrade without me, and managed to crash.

So after the crash I turned off Automatic Updates in the Control Panel.  However, Vista doesn’t approve. It still feels the need to bug me about updating or “I’ll do it automatically for you!” still!  I cannot seem to get rid of the option for Windows to auto-update, which means I most likely will wake up in the morning with another failed update/crash.  I’m sitting here trying to Postpone the update over and over again.

What happens when I go home and leave the update to itself again?  What happens if I turn the computer off?  Will it Automatic Update on load like it did last time?  There’s no good answer, every answer is a threat to all my lovely documents and I have no control over it.  The only way to guarantee my computer would survive the night would be to press the “Postpone” button on the computer every time it pops up, all through the night.

My computer controls my life :(.  Let’s hope for the best tomorrow.